Installation

Before you building libpnicore from sources one should first check if pre-built binary packages are available. Building the library from the sources requires a certain level of expertise which not all users posess. As libpnicore is mostly a template library only a few non performance critical components have to be compiled. Therefore, custom builds of the libraries binaries are not necessary in order to get optimum performance.

Installing pre-built binary packages

Binary packages are currently available for the following platforms

  • Debian/GNU Linux
  • Ubuntu Linux

Debian and Ubuntu users

As Debian and Ubuntu are closely related the installation is quite similar. The packages are provided by a special Debian repository. To work on the package sources you need to login as root user. Use su or sudo su on Debian and Ubuntu respectively. The first task is to add the GPG key of the HDRI repository to your local keyring

$ wget -q -O - http://repos.pni-hdri.de/debian_repo.pub.gpg | apt-key add -

The return value of this command line should be OK. In a next step you have to add new package sources to your system. For this purpose go to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and download the sources file. For Debian (Bullseye) use

$ wget http://repos.pni-hdri.de/bullseye-pni-hdri.list

and for Ubuntu (Hirsute)

$ wget http://repos.pni-hdri.de/hirsute-pni-hdri.list

The packages are also available for Debian Buster, Stretch and Focal, Bionic, Groovy.

Once you have downloaded the file use

$ apt-get update

to update your package list and

$ apt-get install libpnicore1.1.1 libpnicore1.1.1-dev libpnicore1.1.1-doc

to install the library. Dependencies will be resolved automatically so you can start with working right after the installation has finished.

Install from sources

If your OS platform or a particular Linux distribution is currently not supported you have to build libpnicore from its sources. As this process usually requires some expert knowledge keep be prepared to get your hands dirty.

Requirements

For a successful build some requirements must be satisfied

  • gcc >= 4.7 – since version 1.0.0 libpnicore requires a mostly C++11
    compliant compiler. For the gcc familiy this is 4.7 and upwards
  • BOOST >= 4.1
  • doxygen cite{web:doxygen} – used to build the API documentation
  • cmake cite{web:cmake} $>=$ 2.4.8 – the build software used by the libpnicore
  • pkg-config cite{web:pkgconfig} – program to manage libraries

Building the code

The sources can be obtained directly from the Git repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/pni-libraries/libpnicore.git
$ cd libpnicore
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update --remote
$ cd ..

which will result in a new directory named libpnicore. As we use cmake for building the library, out of place builds are recommended. For this purpose create a new directory where the code will be built and change to this directory

$ mkdir libpnicore-build
$ cd libpnicore-build

Now call cmake with a path to the original source directory

$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../libpnicore

A subsequent make finally build the library

$ make

This may take a while. Actually building the library is quite fast as libpnicore is mostly a template, and thus header-only, library. However, building the test suite is rather time consuming.

Testing the build

Once the build has finished you should definitely run the tests. libpnicore uses the ctest facility of cmake. To build and run the tests just type

$ make check

Installation

If the build has passed the test suite libpnicore can be installed from within the build directory with

$ make install

By default the installation prefix is /usr/local. If another prefix should be used the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX variable must be set when running cmake with

$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/pni ../libpnicore

which causes the installation prefix to be /opt/pni.