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.

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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

External links

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• Raspberry Pi foundation home page
• Raspberry Pi page in Wikipedia
• Slackware home page
• Slackware Linux for the ARM architecture
• Unofficial Support page for Slackware and Raspberry Pi
• TDE home page
• TDE download links

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Languages: English - Italiano