Build Dependencies
==================
:Author: core-devs
:Date: 2/2020
:toc:


_Lumiera is written for GNU/Linux._ +
We try to get the best out of modern system programming
techniques to reach a solid performance and good throughput.
Lumiera shall scale with the provided Hardware,
the more RAM and the more/faster CPU's you have the better.
Nevertheless lower end 32bit machines are supported too.

Secondary targets will be other free operating systems which offer a decent Posix API.
Porting to other more or less similar platforms will be possible, if -- by coincidence --
Someone(TM) helps with porting.

Having said that -- for the time being, the core team won't spend much effort on porting.

Platform
--------
We develop and test on standard PC hardware, 32 and 64 bit.
It is intended to target other platforms running GNU/Linux eventually.
Lumiera expects a `standard' desktop installation running a XServer.

Graphics::
  There are no special requirements for the graphic system.
  Hardware acceleration will likely be added later through extensions,
  but will remain strictly optional.footnote:[For the time being, we'll watch
  the evolution in that area and might revisit that topic when there are more
  compelling and widely supported solutions available]

Disks::
  No special requirements. Video editing requires decent disk speed though,
  so it is suggested to use a fast/big array of disks configured as raid.

Special Hardware::
  Support for special hardware would be possible, but depends on certain conditions
+
* we need access / donations for the hardware
* Specs and APIs must be open.
* someone to do the actual interfacing and support needs to join the team

Compatibility
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We try to keep our depdendencies close to Debian/stable and the most recent Ubuntu LTS.
Whenever we need more recent libraries or other dependencies not available for our reference platform,
we care to provide custom Debian / Ubuntu packages as reference. This does not mean Lumiera is
limited to Devian flavours, it should work on any current Linux distribution.

Languages and Tools
-------------------

* C / C++

 - a C99 / C++17 compatible compiler footnote:[in practice, we build using GCC and
   occasionally we check using Clang]
 - GCC *7* or Clang *6* should be fine footnote:[basically we try to use just the stock language.
   On rare occasions in the past, we _did_ use some GCC extensions, like `typeof()`, but we care for
   workarounds, in case this becomes a problem. Incidentally, `typeof()` is obsoleted by the new
   C++ standard, which provides `decltype()` for this purpose.].

* BOOST (listed below are the Debian package names)
 - libboost-dev (at least *1.67*)
 - libboost-program-options-dev
 - libboost-program-options-dev

* Script languages
 - Python (*2.x*) might still be handy for build scripts.footnote:[SCons supports both Python 2.x
   and Python 3.x transparently. Basically there is no reason to stick to Python 2.x -- just the standard
   python is not yet switched on Debian/stable, and so we might miss out on some scripts.]
 - bash (some test scripts use bash specific extensions)

Build Tools
~~~~~~~~~~~

* Git
* SCons *2.0* footnote:[we build with SCons >= 3.0 since a long time. However, since the times of 2.0,
  there are no major breaking improvements we rely on -- so chances are that the Build works fine with
  older versions. In addition, we use some SCons plug-ins, which are all shipped in-tree (`admin/scons`)]
* pkg-config
* Doxygen

We maintain a link:/documentation/technical/infra/debianDepot.html[Debian/Ubuntu package] (relying on debhelper, CDBS, git-buildpackage)

Libraries
~~~~~~~~~

* BOOST
* link:http://nobug.pipapo.org/[NoBug]
* https://github.com/bplaum/gavl[GAVL] (for raw media support)
* ALSA: libasound2-dev
* for the GUI: (*GTK-3*) gtkmm-3.0 gdlmm-3.0 glibmm-2.4 cairomm-1.0 xv
 - libgtkmm-3.0-dev
 - libcairomm-1.0-dev
 - libglibmm-2.4-dev, requiring at least glib2.0 (2.40 or better) and gthread-2.0
 - libxv-dev footnote:[for the XV viewer widget `gui/output/xvdisplayer.cpp`
     -- currently obsolete as of [yellow-background]#5/2015#][yellow-background]#TODO 5/2015# and X-lib
 - librsvg-2.0 and librsvg2-dev for rendering Icons
 - libgdl-3 (3.12 or better) through libgdlmm-3 -- the »Gnome Docking Library«footnote:[GDL isn't directly related to GNOME any more.
   We contributed to the improvement of this library in the past. These improvements went upstream
   with GDL-2.27. At times, we used to ship our own GDL package. Right now, a recent upstream version
   together with the corresponding *mm-bindings will do. We provide a debian package for the latter,
   until they will be available in the official Debian/Ubuntu/Mint repos. But we don't have any
   special requirements on these `gdlmm` bindings.]