I’ve never been happy with the hackish build system for rawproc. I think it’s what has kept a lot of you from trying it, especially on Linux. The Windows installer releases have been pretty simple and reliable to get a full-up rawproc, but the AppImage is borked for most uses other than Ubuntu…
I’m writing this in part to illustrate the challenges in integrating all the supporting libraries to make a raw processor useful; sudo apt install (a bunch of packages) just doesn’t cut it. i enumerated most in a previous post somewhere recently but here’s the key concerns:
-
Distro packages don’t keep up with library development. This is particularly problematic with libraw, and probably any other raw-ingesting library. New cameras get introduced all the time, and their unique-ness has to be accommodated per-camera.
-
Distro packages don’t sometimes include useful features. LittleCMS’ fast-float speeds up color transforms greatly, not every build environment has enabled it due to the different licensing. Lensfun 0.3.95 contains useful features to allow an application developer to flag which corrections are available from the database, but no build system I’ve inspected (Ubuntu, mxe, msys2) goes better than 0.3.3.
So, for rawproc to be really functional one needs to build at least libraw, lcms2, and lensfun by-hand, and then incorporate their include headers and libraries into the build system. I’ve been using an autotools/configure and GNU make build system, which just let me force-feed paths and files at the right places, I’d be curious if there’s anyone out there who’s built rawproc with one or more hand-fed libraries…
Anyway, a cascade of little things led me to write a CMake build system. Now, that’s been a painful experience, because I really want to learn just enough CMake to do my particular task. But CMake isn’t like that, it has its own personality: syntax conventions, data organization, that just defy my notions of dealing with a programming language. My hobby here is photography, trying hard not to make CMake a ‘hobby’…
Anyway, rawproc as of commit #7161f42 pushed a minute ago now lets one build rawproc with cmake, either with distro packages, downloaded and compiled packages, or a mix of the two. If you go the distro route the package dependencies are in the README, install those and do this:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make doc
and you’ll get a ready-to-run rawproc in that build directory.
Alternatively, if you want to tie up your machine for a few minutes, do this:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DBUILD_LCMS2=ON -DBUILD_LIBRAW=ON -DBUILD_LENSFUN=ON -DBUILD_EXIV2=ON -DLENSFUN_DBUPDATE=ON -DBUILD_LIBRTPROCESS=ON ..
make
make doc
and in a bit you’ll have a working rawproc with all the most recent libraries. This bit of CMake business will download or clone each library, build it and make the headers and libs available to rawproc for its build.
For you developers, I used CMake’s ExternalProject facility to do this. It handles all manner of retrieval, and give one pretty decent control over the configure/build process, handling such things as requiring an install step for exiv2 because it does a header build that doesn’t show up until install. It took a bit of stackoverflow-searching to get the library and dependency thing sorted out, but it works well with the alternative FindPackage option for using distro packages.
One downfall of it is doing subsequent makes for rawproc code development. It’s a mishmash of cmake and autotools configuration, and ExternalProject wants to run the autotools configures every time. LittleCMS and Libraw have this situation. The CMake literature talks about using a ‘superproject’ organization to get around this, where you make your software just another ExternalProject, sorry, my head cmake-hurts too much right now to consider this.
I simply hate these things; my mill is sitting with a model steam locomotive part halfway-cut while I muddle through all this. That’s another rabbit hole; my other hobby is model railroading, but I’m also wading through learning machine shop to support my aims there. Machining is like cmake in that regard, but it makes more sense… 
If any of you try the new build system, let me know if/how it works for you…
Edit: Cripes forgot wxWidgets! For Ubuntu, do this:
sudo apt install libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev
for msys2:
pacman - S mingw-w64-x86_64-wxwidgets3.2-msw
I’m going to work on the ExternalProject for it in the next couple of days…
