Compiling BookmarkBridge From Source

## BookmarkBridge User Manual |

### Chapter 3. How BookmarkBridge Works

### Compiling BookmarkBridge From Source

Since BookmarkBridge is a multi-platform program, the instructions for compiling from the source code differ a bit between platforms. Even though the procedure for compiling BookmarkBridge may differ between platforms, the source code itself is exactly the same, whether for Windows or Unix. All files necessary for compiling it for all supported platforms are present in the source distribution.

### Development Pre-requisites

BookmarkBridge was written using a few open-source toolkits. Before compiling BookmarkBridge under Windows or Unix, you must ensure these development kits are available on your computer.

Qt
  Qt is a multi-platform GUI development framework available for Windows, Unix (X11), and Macintosh. For Unix you need to make sure you have the Qt/X11 Open Source Edition. For Windows you need to obtain the Qt/Windows Open Source Edition. Both are available free from TrollTech at www.trolltech.com. BookmarkBridge requires Qt 4.0.1.
Libxml
  Libxml is an off-shoot of the Gnome Desktop Environment. It is a toolkit used for reading and writing XML and HTML files. BookmarkBridge is written to use libxml2. You can download a development toolkit at www.xmlsoft.org.

### Compiling BookmarkBridge for Windows

Compiling BookmarkBridge for Windows is not for the faint of heart. The requirements for your build environment will take some time and patience to set up. You will need the Cygwin POSIX environment. Make sure you select the libxml-devel package. The Qt 4.0.1 open source edition for Windows requires the MinGW compiler, available at www.mingw.org.

As part of the source distribution I provide a .pro file. Before compiling you need to be sure the include. The qmake program will produce a makefile suitable for your system from the .pro file.

### Compiling BookmarkBridge for Unix

On Unix, BookmarkBridge uses the standard GNU build procedure. Just run the following commands at a shell prompt:

    #: ./configure
    #: make
    #: make install

As of this this time (the year 2005) no Linux distros come with Qt 4.x. You will need to obtain and build it if you can't find a pre-built package for your distro.

If you receive an error message during compilation that the file <libxml/parser.h> is missing, then you can tell configure where to find the files. As discussed in the Development Pre-requisites section above, you must have the development files for libxml2 installed. The default is /usr/include/libxml2, but you can use the following:

    #: ./configure --with-libxml2-include=/usr/local/include/libxml2

Is this case,

    /usr/local/include/libxml2

is the directory where the compiler can expect to find the libxml directory containing the include files for libxml2.

Table of Contents Previous: Theory of Operation Next: Source Code Roadmap

BookmarkBridge is Copyright © 2003 by Ken Schenke. All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.