En/Trinity desktop environment 14.0.8

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TDE 14.0.8

29 April 2020 marked the 10th birthday of the Trinity Desktop Environment and developers celebrated with commemorative release 14.0.8 of the desktop environment. Best birthday wishes to a great project and its community. The maintenance version 14.0.8 includes some patches to errors present in the previous 14.0.7 release as well as some minor improvements. The development team included some updates to the build procedure of a couple of packages. In the following article I'll discuss the changes introduced making everyone that wishes to, able to build the entire environment on Slackware Linux. For the impatient, a link is available at the bottom of the page from which to download the archive containing all of the build scripts. At the bottom of the page you can find the link to the project download page including links to the source code.

What's New

Few new features made their way into version 14.0.8. Since it is a maintenance release, the efforts of the developers were obviously directed to troubleshooting bugs of version 14.0.7, but some changes can still prevent you from building all packages with scripts meant for the previous release.

Akode

One of such changes is an update of the documentation file list included in the source code of akode: a library to decode some audio file formats. The NEWS file was removed form the list. The missing file triggers an error while copying the documentation files into the package, breaking the whole process.

Script line:

   DOCS="AUTHORS COPYING INSTALL NEWS PACKAGING README"

was changed into:

   DOCS="AUTHORS COPYING INSTALL PACKAGING README"

to prevent the issue. The updated script works flawlessly.

Tqca

The tqca package includes some libraries providing encryption and decryption functionality to tqt, the base libraries Trinity Desktop Environment is built upon. The TQt Cryptographic Architecture package required autotools to build, but the newer release was migrated to cmake as the great majority of programs and libraries making up the desktop environment. This is another small step in fully replacing autotools. A praise goes to the developers who have been working to the migration for the past decade.

The build script was updated for CMake.

Autotools to CMake Migration Status

The following table associates each package with the respective build system. Reviewing the summary one can appreciate the progress of the migration and understand how close the final goal is.

BUILD SYSTEMS USED IN TDE
Group Package Cmake Autotools Other
base tdeaccessibility X
base tdeaddons X
base tdeadmin X
base tdeartwork X
base tdebase X
base tdebindings X
base tdeedu X
base tdegames X
base tdegraphics X
base tdelibs X
base tdemultimedia X
base tdenetwork X
base tdepim X
base tdesdk X
base tdetoys X
base tdeutils X
library kipi-plugins X
library libkdcraw X
library libkexiv2 X
library libkipi X
library libksquirrel X
library libtdeldap X
library libtqt-perl X
library pytdeextensions X
library python-trinity X
prerequisite akode X
prerequisite arts X
prerequisite avahi-tqt X
prerequisite dbus-1-tqt X
prerequisite dbus-tqt X
prerequisite libart-lgpl X
prerequisite libcaldav X
prerequisite libcarddav X
prerequisite libr X
prerequisite python-tqt X
prerequisite sip4-tqt X
prerequisite tqca X
prerequisite tqca-tls X
prerequisite tqscintilla X
prerequisite tqt3 X
prerequisite tqtinterface X

Packages still requiring CMake are but a few. The migration is almost completed.



UPDATED BUILD TREE

Here is the link pointing to the build scripts packaged into a conveniently compressed archive: tde_build_tree_sg-14.0.8.tar.bz2. Download and decompress it, copy the source archives to the target directories bearing the same name then run the TDE.SlackBuild script to start building the desktop environment from scratch. I strongly suggest removing any installed version of TDE to avoid conflicts when building new packages.


CONCLUSIONS

This paper provides a summary for some new features introduced in the Trinity Desktop Environment build system with release 14.0.8. The build scripts were updated, tested and collected in a compressed archive in order to ease their adoption and use. For more in depth instructions on the use of the scripts, please refer to the other articles available in this web site. Compiling, installing, configuration and testing were preformed on a Raspberry Pi model 4 which runs a version of Slackware Linux for the ARM platform. In conclusion, all that remains to do is to thank the TDE developers and contributors for the excellent work done and wish the project a happy 10th birthday.


For any feedback, questions, errors and such, please e-mail me at studiosg [at] giustetti [dot] net


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Languages: English - Italiano