New Thing today: build a tarball

I'm no longer running Amarok from GIT! Today was tagging for 2.3.2 (yay!), and Nightrose needed tarball testers. A tarball is "A package of files gathered together using the tar utility." (rbt.phs.com.tw/manual/glossary.html) To clarify, once the developers agree that Amarok is ready to release, it is tagged, and compressed for testing, then available to the distribution packagers.

I've never participated in the tarball testing, because I didn't know how, and didn't like the idea of ditching my git version. However, in the last six months, building from git has become almost second nature. Leo Franchi (lfranchi) helpfully explained how to build from a tarball, in three easy steps. Step one, download. If you have never used wget, it is worthwhile learning, because it is super EASY and FAST. In this case, the command was

cd ~/kde/src/
~/kde/src$ wget http://xyz.net/~account/amarok-2.3.2.tar.bz2wget

Once it downloaded, oh so quickly, it was time to untar the file, thus:

~/kde/src$ tar xf amarok-2.3.2.tar.bz2

And then build as usual:

cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok
~/kde/build/amarok$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok

(I did cmake in case it was needed, perhaps it isn't)

~/kde/build/amarok$ make -j3 && make install

In a very few minutes, it was built and running successfully!

Thanks to all the Amarok developers who have helped me learn how to help out this year.

Note: because I was already running Amarok built from git, all the directories were set up, and dependencies installed. If you are building an app from a tarball for the first time, it will be a bit more complicated, as you must set up your directories and install any dependencies too. There is usually a README file (text file) which you can open and use as your guide to installation.