Detailed compilation instructions
A full build of librsvg requires autotools. A full build will produce these (see Librsvg as a product for details):
rsvg-convert
binary and itsman
page.librsvg shared library with the GObject-based API.
Gdk-pixbuf loader for SVG files.
HTML documentation for the GObject-based API, with
gi-docgen
.GObject-introspection information for language bindings.
Vala language bindings.
Librsvg uses a mostly normal autotools setup. The historical details of how librsvg integrates Cargo and Rust into its autotools setup are described in this blog post, although hopefully you will not need to refer to it.
It is perfectly fine to ask the maintainer if you have questions about the Autotools setup; it’s a tricky bit of machinery, and we are glad to help.
The rest of this document explains librsvg’s peculiarities apart from the usual way of compiling Autotools projects:
Basic compilation instructions
If you are compiling a tarball:
./configure --enable-gtk-doc --enable-vala
make
make install
See the INSTALL
file for details on options you can
pass to the configure
script to select where to install the compiled
library.
If you are compiling from a git checkout:
./autogen.sh --enable-gtk-doc --enable-vala
make
make install
The --enable-gtk-doc
and --enable-vala
arguments are
optional. They will check that you have gi-docgen and the Vala compiler
installed, respectively.
Verbosity
By default the compilation process is quiet, and it just tells you which files it is compiling.
If you wish to see the full compilation command lines, use
“make V=1
” instead of plain “make
”.
Debug or release builds
Librsvg’s artifacts have code both in C and Rust, and each language has a different way of specifying compilation options to select compiler optimizations, or whether debug information should be included.
Rust code: the librsvg shared library, and the
rsvg-convert
binary. See below.C code: the gdk-pixbuf loader; you should set the
CFLAGS
environment variable with compiler flags that you want to pass to the C compiler.
Controlling debug or release mode for Rust
With a
configure
option:--enable-debug
or--disable-debug
With an environment variable:
LIBRSVG_DEBUG=yes
orLIBRSVG_DEBUG=no
For the Rust part of librsvg, we have a flag that you can pass at
configure
time. When enabled, the Rust sub-library will have
debugging information and no compiler optimizations. This flag is off
by default: if the flag is not specified, the Rust sub-library will be
built in release mode (no debug information, full compiler
optimizations).
The rationale is that people who already had scripts in place to build binary packages for librsvg, generally from release tarballs, are already using conventional machinery to specify C compiler options, such as that in RPM specfiles or Debian source packages. However, they may not contemplate Rust libraries and they will certainly not want to modify their existing packaging scripts too much.
So, by default, the Rust library builds in release mode, to make
life easier to binary distributions. Librsvg’s build scripts will add
--release
to the Cargo command line by default.
Developers can request a debug build of the Rust code by passing
--enable-debug
to the configure
script, or by setting the
LIBRSVG_DEBUG=yes
environment variable before calling configure
.
This will omit the --release
option from Cargo, so that it will
build the Rust sub-library in debug mode.
In case both the environment variable and the command-line option are specified, the command-line option overrides the env var.
Selecting a Rust toolchain
By default, the configure/make steps will use the cargo
binary that
is found in your $PATH
. If you have a system installation of Rust
and one in your home directory, or for special build systems, you may
need to override the locations of cargo
and/or rustc
. In this
case, you can set any of these environment variables before running
configure
or autogen.sh
:
RUSTC
- path to therustc
compilerCARGO
- path tocargo
Note that $RUSTC
only gets used in the configure
script to
ensure that there is a Rust compiler installed with an appropriate
version. The actual compilation process just uses $CARGO
, and
assumes that that cargo
binary will use the same Rust compiler as
the other variable.
Cross-compilation
If you need to cross-compile librsvg, specify the --host=TRIPLE
to
the configure
script as usual with Autotools. This will cause
librsvg’s build scripts to automatically pass --target=TRIPLE
to
cargo
.
Note, however, that Rust may support different targets than the C compiler on your system. Rust’s supported targets can be found in the rustc manual
You can check Jorge Aparicio’s guide on cross-compilation for Rust for more details.
Overriding the Rust target name
If you need cargo --target=FOO
to obtain a different value from the
one you specified for --host=TRIPLE
, you can use the RUST_TARGET
variable, and this will be passed to cargo
. For example,
RUST_TARGET=aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu ./configure --host=aarch64-buildroot-linux-gnu
# will run "cargo --target=aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu" for the Rust part
Cross-compiling to a target not supported by Rust out of the box
When building with a target that is not supported out of the box by Rust, you have to do this:
Create a target JSON definition file.
Set the environment variable
RUST_TARGET_PATH
to its directory for themake
command.
Example:
cd /my/target/definition
echo "JSON goes here" > MYMACHINE-VENDOR-OS.json
cd /source/tree/for/librsvg
./configure --host=MYMACHINE-VENDOR-OS
make RUST_TARGET_PATH=/my/target/definition
Cross-compiling for win32 target
You can also cross-compile to win32 (Microsoft Windows) target by using MinGW-w64. You need to specify the appropriate target in the same way as usual:
Set an appropriate target via the
--host
configure option:i686-w64-mingw32
for 32-bit targetx86_64-w64-mingw32
for 64-bit target
Set an appropriate RUST_TARGET:
i686-pc-windows-gnu
for 32-bit targetx86_64-pc-windows-gnu
for 64-bit target
In addition you may need to link with some win32 specific libraries like
LIBS="-lws2_32 -luserenv"
.
Example:
./configure \
--host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 \
RUST_TARGET=x86_64-pc-windows-gnu \
LIBS="-lws2_32 -luserenv"
make
The most painful aspect of this way of building is preparing a win32 build for each of librsvg’s dependencies. MXE may help you on this work.
Building with no network access
Automated build systems generally avoid network access so that they can compile from known-good sources, instead of pulling random updates from the net every time. However, normally Cargo likes to download dependencies when it first compiles a Rust project.
You can use cargo vendor to download librsvg’s Rust dependencies ahead of time, so that subsequent compilation don’t require network access.
Build systems can use Cargo’s source replacement mechanism to override the location of the source code for the Rust dependencies, for example, in order to patch one of the Rust crates that librsvg uses internally.
Running make distcheck
The make distcheck
command will built a release tarball, extract it,
compile it and test it. However, part of the make install
process
within that command will try to install the gdk-pixbuf loader in your
system location, and it will fail.
Please run make distcheck
like this:
$ make distcheck DESTDIR=/tmp/foo
That DESTDIR
will keep the gdk-pixbuf loader installation from
trying to modify your system locations.