Return to gThumb main page

Development

This is the development page for gthumb

Hacking gThumb

Patches incorporating new features and new strings should be based on the git master branch.

gthumb uses the Meson build system. You can compile the most recent development code on your system if you have the latest release of a bleeding-edge distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. The basic procedure is this:

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gthumb.git
cd gthumb
CFLAGS="-ggdb" meson --prefix=/usr build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C install

See Git/Developers and GitLab for more information.

If you want to run gThumb without having to install it (not to overwrite your stable version of gThumb for example), you can use the --enable-run-in-place, like this:

CFLAGS="-ggdb",--enable-run-in-place meson --prefix=/usr

A segmentation fault may result if gthumb is run after moving the source directory. To solve this run "make clean", followed by the above command, and finally "make" once more.

If you make major changes to the code, it is generally helpful to run cppcheck to check your code, like this:

cppcheck -q --enable=unusedFunctions .

or, adding additional style checks,

cppcheck -q --enable=all .

This may give some false warnings, however (especially with --enable=all).

Dependencies

To compile gThumb, you will need some packages that are not normally installed on a desktop system.

Ubuntu

In 2018, the minimum ones were:

sudo apt-get install libtiff-dev libtiff5-dev libclutter-gtk-1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libsoup-gnome2.4-dev libsecret-1-dev libbrasero-media3-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev bison flex

On Fedora

Build dependencies can be installed via the command :

dnf builddep gthumb

These are the build dependencies of the fedora-packaged rpm version of gthumb. Additional packages might be necessary for extensions. If the autogen process fails, and says "missing somefile.so", you can use "dnf provides */somefile.so" to figure out the needed package.

Using git

To get code:

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gthumb.git

To generate a merge request (patch), see Git/Developers and GitLab.

You can also quickly browse the code through the git web viewer here

More information about git is available here:

• Getting the most out of Git in GNOME

• git cheat sheet

Extensions / Plug-Ins

gThumb supports plug-ins. Many of the existing tools are implemented as plug-ins. If you want to add a feature (like geolocation, etc) consider writing an extension!