Actually, the only supported way to get the ADG on your system is by building it from the sources. Being the developers the target audience of this project, this is not a big deal.

If you run into problems, there is no "blessed" way to get support: you can either subscribe to the mailing list or submit an issue to Codeberg, GitLab or GitHub. Please, ensure at least that you have read and tried the following instructions before posting.

License

The Automatic Drawing Generation library is released under the terms of the LGPL 2.1 license or later (at your option). This choice was made to be compatible with the underlying libraries, all of them availables under the LGPL.

Backward compatibility

Application programming and binary interfaces (API and ABI) are monitored for issues on every release. This service is kindly provided by ABI laboratory: kudos to Andrey Ponomarenko for the help.

Prerequisites/dependencies

The ADG library is based on the following software packages:

  • GLib 2.38.0 or later [required]
    GLib, together with the embedded GObject library, provides object oriented programming layer to plain C, binding facilities, commonly used data structures and much more.
  • cairo 1.7.4 or later [required]
    The core of the ADG project: a 2D rendering engine with multiple backends, such as x11, png, pdf, ps and svg.
  • pango 1.10.0 or later [optional]
    Pango, and more specifically pangocairo, is used for serious text rendering by the AdgText entity.
  • GTK 3.0.0 or later (or 2.18.0 or later for GTK2 support) [optional]
    Used by the demo program to provide a showcase program.
  • gobject-introspection 1.0.0 or later [optional]
    For generating the metadata needed by the language bindings.
  • gtk-doc 1.12.0 or later [optional]
    For building the reference manual.
  • meson 0.56.0 or later [optional]
    The new build system is based on meson, so this will become a requirement as soon as the old autotools system is dropped.

The [required] dependencies are mandatory and should be installed before the configuration phase. If you plan on developing with ADG, all these projects should be installed along with their development version if your distribution differentiates between runtime and development flavours.

Building from the sources

When no binary packages are available or if you need to tweak some option or simply want to play with the code, there is the (hopefully) ever working approach of building the package by yourself. Being developers the target audience of the ADG project, building from sources is the best supported way in any case.

Issues and hints found on some platform are reported on the Screenshot and hints page. The following sections should be considered more like a set of suggestions than a list of instructions.

Getting the sources

You can get the sources in two ways: by downloading a prepackaged source tarball or by directly fetching the code from a git repository.

The source tarball is the simplest method because the tarball is packaged in a (hopefully) buildable state and requires only the dependencies cited above. In most cases, this is the way to go.

Fetching the sources from the repository is reserved for ADG developers or advanced users. Sometimes it is also useful for getting a bleeding edge version that provides a recently implemented feature not released yet. Building using this approach requires git and meson (or the whole autotools infrastructure in place though.

Using a source tarball

The ADG source tarballs can be downloaded directly from the GitHub release page. You just need to unpack the tarball somewhere in your file system, e.g.:

wget https://github.com/ntd/adg/releases/download/0.9.3/adg-0.9.3.tar.bz2
tar xjvf adg-0.9.3.tar.bz2
cd adg-0.9.3

Fetching from a git repository

The ADG source code is managed by git, a distribuited version control system with strong support for non-linear development. Actually, there are three public repositories availables: Codeberg, GitLab and GitHub. They are kept in sync with the official repository, so you can freely clone your repository from anyone of them.

Once you have cloned the repository, and only if you are using the old autotools based build system, you need to regenerate the autotools files. This requires a whole bunch of dependencies to be installed, that is (at least) autoconf, automake, libtool and gtk-doc.

# As an example, here I am cloning from codeberg
git clone https://codeberg.org/ntd/adg
cd adg
# The following step is not needed if building using meson
./autogen.sh

Compilation

The new build system is based on meson, a saner and much quicker build system than autotools. In the example below, we are using the _build folder because the more common build (without underscore) is used by autotools.

meson _build
meson compile -C _build
meson test -C _build  # Not needed: run the test suite
_build/demo/adg-demo  # Not needed: launch the demo program

Check meson_options.txt to see the available options you can setup to customize your building. As an example, the following command builds a headless ADG (i.e. without GTK, typical when using it to build a web service) with introspection support (so it can be used from Lua or Python):

meson _build-headless \
  -D pango=enabled \
  -D gtk=no \
  -D catalogdir=no \
  -D gtk-doc=disabled \
  -D introspection=enabled \
  -D tests=disabled
meson compile -C _build-headless

If you are still relying on the old autotools build system, just proceed in the usual way:

./configure
make
make check     # Not needed: run the test suite
demo/adg-demo  # Not needed: launch the demo program

In this case too there are a lot of options you can pass to ./configure for customizing the build: check the output of ./configure --help for hints.

Installation

You need enough privileges to access the destination directory for writing. By default the destination folder is set to /usr/local on most systems, so you need to enable root privileges. If this is the case, use su, sudo or something similar before proceeding or you will get a permission denied error.

On a meson based build, just run:

meson install -C _build

On an autotools based build, run this instead:

make install

At the end of this stage, at least two shared libraries (libcpml-1.so and libadg-1.so or similar) together with their headers and pkg-config support files should be copied into their destination folders.