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Building and Packaging Quaternion

Quaternion-master@Travis Quaternion-master@AppVeyor license Chat PRs Welcome

Getting the source code

The source code is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion. The best way for one-off building is checking out a tag for a given release from GitHub (make sure to pass --recurse-submodules to git checkout if you use Option 2 - see below). If you plan to work on Quaternion code, feel free to fork/clone the repo and base your changes on the master branch.

Quaternion needs libQuotient to build. There are two options to use the library:

  1. Use a library installation known to CMake - either as a package available from your package repository (possibly but not necessarily system-wide), or as a result of building the library from the source code in another directory. In the latter case CMake internally registers the library upon succesfully building it so you shouldn't even need to pass CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH (still better do pass it, to avoid surprises).
  2. As a Git submodule. If you haven't cloned Quaternion sources yet, the following will get you all sources in one go: 
    git clone --recursive https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion.git
    If you already have cloned Quaternion, do the following in the top-level directory (NOT in lib subdirectory): 
    git submodule init
git submodule update
    In either case here, to correctly check out a given tag or branch, make sure to also check out submodules: 
    git checkout --recurse-submodules <ref>

Depending on your case, either option can be preferrable. General guidance is:

  • Option 1 is strongly recommended for packaging and also good for development on Quaternion without changing libQuotient;
  • Option 2 is better for one-off building and for active development when both Quaternion and libQuotient get changed.

These days Option 2 is used by default (with a fallback to Option 1 if no libQuotient is found under lib/). To override that you can pass USE_INTREE_LIBQMC option to CMake: -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=0 (or NO, or OFF) will force Option 1 (using an external libQuotient even when a submodule is there). The other way works too: if you intend to use libQuotient from the submodule, pass -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=1 (or YES, or ON) to make sure the build configuration process fails instead of finding an external libQuotient somewhere when a submodule is unusable for some reason (e.g. when --recursive has been forgotten when cloning).

Pre-requisites

  • a recent Linux, macOS or Windows system (desktop versions tried; mobile platforms might work too but never tried)
    • Recent enough Linux examples: Debian Buster; Fedora 28; OpenSUSE Leap 15; Ubuntu Bionic Beaver.
  • Qt 5 (either Open Source or Commercial), version 5.11 or higher (5.14+ is recommended). Quaternion 0.0.95 and earlier does not build with Qt 6.
  • CMake 3.10 or newer (from your package management system or the official website)
  • A C++ toolchain with C++17 support:
    • GCC 7 (Windows, Linux, macOS), Clang 6 (Linux), Apple Clang 10 (macOS) and Visual Studio 2017 (Windows) are the oldest officially supported.
  • Any build system that works with CMake should be fine: GNU Make, ninja (any platform), NMake, jom (Windows) are known to work.
  • optionally, libQuotient 0.6.x development files (from your package management system), or prebuilt libQuotient (see "Getting the source code" above). libQuotient 0.7 (in development as of this writing) is not compatible with Quaternion 0.0.95.
  • optionally (but strongly recommended), QtKeychain to store access tokens in libsecret keyring or similar providers.

Linux

Just install things from the list above using your preferred package manager. If your Qt package base is fine-grained you might want to take a look at CMakeLists.txt to figure out which specific libraries Quaternion uses (or blindly run cmake and look at error messages). Note also that you'll need several Qt Quick plugins for Quaternion to work (without them, it will compile and run but won't show the messages timeline). On Debian/Ubuntu, the following line should get you everything necessary to build and run Quaternion:

sudo apt-get install cmake qtdeclarative5-dev qttools5-dev qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-controls2 qtmultimedia5-dev

To enable keyring support, also install QtKeychain by

sudo apt-get install qt5keychain-dev

On Fedora 28, the following command should be enough for building and running:

sudo dnf install cmake qt5-qtdeclarative-devel qt5-qtquickcontrols qt5-qtquickcontrols2 qt5-qtmultimedia-devel

and QtKeychain can be installed with

sudo dnf install qtkeychain-qt5-devel

macOS

brew install qt5 should get you Qt5. If you want to build with QtKeychain, also call brew install qtkeychain.

You have to point CMake at the Qt5 installation location, with something like:

# if using in-tree libQuotient:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt5)
# or otherwise...
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/libQuotient -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt5)

Windows

  1. Install CMake. The commands in further sections imply that cmake is in your PATH - otherwise you have to prepend them with actual paths.
  2. Install Qt5, using their official installer.
  3. Make sure CMake knows about Qt and the toolchain - the easiest way is to run qtenv2.bat script that can be found in C:\Qt\<Qt version>\<toolchain>\bin (assuming you installed Qt to C:\Qt). The only thing it does is adding necessary paths to PATH - you might not want to run it on system startup but it's very handy to setup environment before building. Setting CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, the same way as for macOS (see above), also helps.
  4. If needed, get and build QtKeychain.

Build

In the root directory of the project sources:

mkdir build_dir
cd build_dir
cmake .. # Pass -D<variable> if needed
cmake --build . --target all

This will get you an executable in build_dir inside your project sources. Noteworthy CMake variables that you can use:

  • -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path - add a path to CMake's list of searched paths for preinstalled software (Qt, libQuotient, QtKeychain); multiple paths are separated by ; (semicolons).
  • -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path - controls where Quaternion will be installed (see below on installing from sources).
  • -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=<ON|OFF> - force using/not-using the in-tree copy of libQuotient sources (see "Getting the source code" above).
  • -DUSE_QQUICKWIDGET=<ON|OFF> - by default it's ON with Qt 5.12 and OFF with earlier versions. See the next section for details.

QQuickWidget

Quaternion uses a combination of Qt Widgets and QML to render its UI (this might change at some point in time but certainly not in any near future). Internally, embedding QML in a Qt Widget used to be done in two ways providing very similar API but different underneath: swallowing a QQuickView object in a window container and using QQuickWidget. Historically Quaternion used the former method; however, QQuickView implementation in Qt is so ugly that it's officially deprecated by The Qt Project.

Quaternion suffered from that ugliness too (see, e.g., #355 - a completely blank timeline despite the QML engine being up and running). As of now, Quaternion uses better and more reliable QQuickWidget when built with Qt 5.12 or newer. Unfortunately, Quaternion's QML is tricky enough to crash the less mature QQuickWidget code on Qt versions before 5.12, so if you have to use an older Qt version Quaternion will build with QQuickView by default.

To override the defaults you can pass -DUSE_QQUICKWIDGET=ON to the first (configuring) cmake invocation to force usage of QQuickWidget even with older Qt; or -DDISABLE_QQUICKWIDGET=ON to force usage of QQuickView with newer Qt - by the way, if you have to do that because of some problem with QQuickWidget, please file an issue at Quaternion).

With QQuickWidget considered stable and reliable now, QQuickView mode will be entirely deprecated in Quaternion 0.0.96 (that will require Qt 5.12+), and later removed.

Install

In the root directory of the project sources: cmake --build build_dir --target install.

If you use GNU Make, make install (with sudo if needed) will work equally well.

Building as Flatpak

If you run Linux and your distribution supports flatpak, you can easily build and install Quaternion as a flatpak package:

git clone https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion.git --recursive
cd Quaternion/flatpak
./setup_runtime.sh
./build.sh
flatpak --user install quaternion-nightly com.github.quaternion

Whenever you want to update your Quaternion package, do the following from the flatpak directory:

./build.sh
flatpak --user update

Troubleshooting

If cmake fails with...

CMake Warning at CMakeLists.txt:11 (find_package):
  By not providing "FindQt5Widgets.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project
  has asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by
  "Qt5Widgets", but CMake did not find one.

...or a similar error referring to Qt5 - make sure that your CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH actually points to the location where Qt5 is installed, see above.

If cmake fails with...

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:30 (add_subdirectory):
  The source directory

    <quaternion-source-directory>/lib

  does not contain a CMakeLists.txt file.

...then you don't have libQuotient sources - most likely because you didn't do the git submodule init && git submodule update dance and don't have libQuotient development files elsewhere - also, see the beginning of this file.

If you have made sure that your toolchain is in order (versions of compilers and Qt are among supported ones, PATH is set correctly etc.) but building fails with strange Qt-related errors such as not found symbols or undefined references, double-check that you don't have Qt 4.x (or Qt 6.x) packages around (here is a typical example). If you need those packages reinstalling them may help; but if you use Qt4/6 by default you have to explicitly pass Qt5 location to CMake (see notes about CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH in "Building").

See also the Troubleshooting section in README.md