Building Clutter on Linux

To build Clutter from sources, get the latest source archives from http://download.gnome.org/sources/clutter/. Once you have extracted the sources from the archive execute the following commands in the top-level directory:

    $ ./configure
    $ make
    # make install

You can configure the build with number of additional arguments passed to the configure script, the full list of which can be obtained by running:

    $ ./configure --help

Note: the list of arguments and their usage is documented in the README file that comes with Clutter.

The default configuration will install Clutter headers and shared libraries under /usr/local; you can use the --prefix and --libdir switches to change the installation location.

The configure script will use the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to check for most of the dependencies; if you are using a non-system prefix you will have to modify that environment variable before running the script.

Building from Git

If you are tracking Clutter's development then the recommended way of building Clutter is to use Jhbuild. JHBuild allows setting up a build and development environment separated from the rest of your system, and avoid compromising your installed copies of Clutter and its dependencies.

Note: even if your distribution provides a package for JHBuild you should definitely use the most recent version available from JHBuild's Git repository on git.gnome.org.

The default GNOME moduleset includes Clutter and all its dependencies, so you are strongly encouraged to use it.

To build only Clutter and its dependencies using JHBuild, you should download and execute the clutter-build-setup.sh file from gnome.org using:

    $ curl http://git.gnome.org/browse/clutter/plain/build/clutter-build-setup.sh -O
    $ /bin/bash ./clutter-build-setup.sh

Note for current JHBuild users: the script will copy the current $HOME/.jhbuildrc file in $HOME/.jhbuildrc-bak, and create a $HOME/.jhbuildrc-custom which can then be edited.

After executing the clutter-build-setup.sh script, you can build Clutter and all its dependencies using:

    $ jhbuild build

This command should work reliably; if you have built Clutter in the past and the build suddenly fails, you should try using:

    $ jhbuild build -f -a -c

If this also fails, you can safely remove the $HOME/clutter directory and restart from scratch.

Failures to build Clutter should be reported on the clutter-devel-list@clutter-project.org mailing list.