Compiling and installing LyX with autotools =========================================== This document is about compiling LyX with the autotools suite. If you want to compile using using CMake (in particular on windows), please refer to the INSTALL.cmake file. Quick compilation guide ----------------------- These four steps will compile, test and install LyX: 0) Linux users beware: You need qt5 and qt5-devel packages of the same version to compile LyX. In general, it is also recommended to have pkg-config installed (the name might vary depending on your distribution). 1) ./configure configures LyX according to your system. You may have to set --with-qt-dir= (for example, "--with-qt-dir=/usr/share/qt5/") if the environment variable QTDIR is not set and pkg-config is not available. See Note below if ./configure script is not present. 2) make compiles the program. 3) src/lyx runs the program so you can check it out. 4) make install will install it. You can use "make install-strip" instead if you want a smaller binary. Note for Git checkouts ----------------------------- If you have checked this out from Git, you need to have: * automake (supported versions are 1.14--1.16) * autoconf (supported versions are 2.65--2.69) Then type "./autogen.sh" to build the needed configuration files and proceed as stated above/below. You will also probably need GNU m4 (perhaps installed as gm4). Requirements ------------ First of all, you will need a C++17 standard conforming compiler, like g++ (we suggest at least version 8.0) or clang++. LyX makes great use of the C++ Standard Library. This means that gcc users will have to install the relevant libstdc++ library to be able to compile this version of LyX. LyX requires Qt 5.12 and higher. It is also possible to compile against Qt 6. The only special point to make is that you must ensure that both LyX and the Qt libraries are compiled with the same C++ compiler. To build LyX with spell checking capabilities included you have to install at least one of the development packages of the spell checker libraries. See the RELEASE-NOTES for details. Users of debian-based distributions are well advised to run 'apt-get build-dep lyx' before compiling to install proper dependencies. Python 3.8 (or newer) must be installed. Python is used for many simple tasks that are executed by external scripts, such as the automatic configuration step and the import of older LyX documents with the lyx2lyx script (this script is called automatically when opening a file). * Other things to note If you make modifications to the source that affect any of the translations or you change the translation files themselves (po/*.po) files, you will need to have the GNU gettext package installed to compile LyX with up-to-date translations (at least gettext version 0.16.1 is needed). You can get the latest version from: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/ Creating the Makefile --------------------- LyX can be configured using GNU autoconf utility which attempts to guess the configuration needed to suit your system. The standard way to use it is described in the file INSTALL.autoconf. In most cases you will be able to create the Makefile by typing ./configure For more complicated cases, LyX configure honors the following specific flags: o --enable-build-type=[rel(ease), pre(release), dev(elopment), prof(iling), gprof] allows to tweak the compiled code. The following table describes the settings in terms of various options that are described later release prerelease development profiling gprof optimization -O2 -O2 -Og -O2 -O2 assertions X X stdlib-assertions X stdlib-debug warnings X X debug X X X X maintainer-mode X The defaults are as follows in terms of version number: release: stable release (2.x.y) prerelease: version number contains `alpha', `beta', `rc' or `pre'. development: version number contains `dev'. The `profiling' build type uses the -fno-omit-frame-pointer option with gcc The `gprof' build type compiles and links with -pg option with gcc. o --enable-qt6 that checks configuration with Qt 6.x, and then Qt 5.x. By default, only Qt5 is tried. o --with-extra-lib=DIRECTORY that specifies the path where LyX will find extra libraries (like Qt) it needs. Defaults to NONE (i.e. search in standard places). You can specify several directories, separated by colons. o --with-extra-inc=DIRECTORY that gives the place where LyX will find extra headers. Defaults to NONE (i.e. search in standard places). You can specify several directories, separated by colons. o --with-extra-prefix[=DIRECTORY] that is equivalent to --with-extra-lib=DIRECTORY/lib --with-extra-inc=DIRECTORY/include If DIRECTORY is not specified, the current prefix is used. o --with-version-suffix[=SUFFIX] will install LyX as lyxSUFFIX. The LyX data directory will be something like /lyxSUFFIX/. Additionally your user configuration files will be found in e.g. $HOME/.lyxSUFFIX. The default for SUFFIX is "-", e.g. lyx-1.6.1. You can use this feature to install more than one version of LyX on the same system. You can optionally specify a "version" of your own, by doing something like : ./configure --with-version-suffix=-latestdev Note that the standard configure options --program-prefix, --program-suffix and the others will not affect the shared LyX directory etc. so it is recommended that you use --with-version-suffix (or --prefix) instead. There are also flags to control the internationalization support in LyX: o --disable-nls suppresses all internationalization support, yielding somewhat smaller code. o You can also set the environment variable LINGUAS to a list of languages in case you do not want to install all the translation files. For example, if you are only interested in German and Finnish, you can type (with sh or bash) export LINGUAS='de fi' before running configure. Moreover, the following generic configure flags may be useful: o --prefix=DIRECTORY specifies the root directory to use for installation. [defaults to /usr/local] o --datadir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where all extra LyX files (documentation, templates and layout definitions) will be installed. [defaults to ${prefix}/share/lyx${program_suffix}] o --bindir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where the lyx binary will be installed. [defaults to ${prefix}/bin] o --mandir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where the man pages will go. [defaults to ${prefix}/man] o --enable-maintainer-mode enables some code that automatically rebuilds the configure script, makefiles templates and other useful files when needed. This is off by default on releases, to avoid surprises. Note that the --with-extra-* commands are not really robust when it comes to using relative paths. If you really want to use a relative path here, you can prepend it with "`pwd`/". If you do not like the default compile flags used (-g -O2 on gcc), you can set CXXFLAGS variable to other values as follows: o CXXFLAGS='-O2' (sh, bash) o setenv CXXFLAGS '-O2' (csh, tcsh) Similarly, if you want to force the use of a specific compiler, you can give a value to the CXX variable. The following options allow you to tweak the generated code more precisely (see the description of --enable-build-type for the default values): o --enable-cxx-mode=VALUE can be used to select a C++ standard, for example --enable-cxx-mode=11. The default is to try C++17, C++14, and C++11, in this order. o --enable-optimization=VALUE enables you to set optimization to a higher level than the default, for example --enable-optimization=-O3. Default is -Og when debugging is enabled, -O2 otherwise. o --disable-optimization - you can use this to disable compiler optimization of LyX. The compile may be much quicker with some compilers, but LyX will be slower. o --enable-debug will add debug information to your binary. This requires a lot more disk space, but is a must if you want to try to debug problems in LyX. There is no run-time penalty. o --enable-warnings that make the compiler output more warnings during the compilation of LyX. Opposite is --disable-warnings. o --enable-assertions that make the compiler generate run-time code which checks that some variables have sane values. Opposite is --disable-assertions. o --enable-stdlib-assertions adds some bound checking code in the libstdc++ standard library; this slows down the code, but has been helpful in the past to find bugs. This has no effect when using llvm's libc++ library. o --enable-stdlib-debug encompasses stdlib-assertions and adds additional checks in libstdc++. Note that this changes the ABI and is in general incompatible with the system hunspell library (as of version 1.5). You may have to use --disable-stdlib-debug when linking development versions against your system's hunspell library. This has no effect when using llvm's libc++ library. Compiling and installing LyX ---------------------------- Once you've got the Makefile created, you just have to type: make all make install All should be OK ;) Since the binaries with debug information tend to be huge (although this does not affect the run-time memory footprint), you might want to strip the lyx binary. In this case replace "make install" with make install-strip BTW: in the lib/images subdirectory there is also small icons `lyx.png' and `lyx.svg', that can be used to display LyX documents in filemanagers. If configure fails for some strange reason ------------------------------------------ Even when configure fails, it creates a Makefile. You can always check the contents of this file, modify it and run 'make'. Compiling For Multiple Architectures ------------------------------------ You can compile LyX for more than one kind of computer at the same time, by placing the object files for each architecture in their own directory. To do this, you must use a version of `make' that supports the `VPATH' variable, such as GNU `make'. `cd' to the directory where you want the object files and executables to go and run the `configure' script. `configure' automatically checks for the source code in the directory that `configure' is in and in `..'. If you have to use a `make' that does not support the `VPATH' variable, you have to compile LyX for one architecture at a time in the source code directory. After you have installed LyX for one architecture, use `make distclean' before reconfiguring for another architecture.