Build the CinGG.AppImage from scratch

If a developer wants to create an appimage from git, follow these next few steps. An existing automated script is available, bld_appimage.sh, in the directory /{path to cinelerra-5.1}.

This follows four steps:

• Build static version of CINELERRA-GG.
• If desired and needed, build the HTML manual for context-sensitive help.
• Organize code and if present, the manual, in a AppImage specific format AppDir. Do this with tool makeappimage, which is built if needed.
• Call an external tool to make the AppDir into an AppImage

Start by downloading the CINELERRA-GG source from Cinelerra's git. The last parameter is a directory name of your choice, the directory must not exist. As example, the name cinelerra5 is used.

	git clone --depth 1 git://git.cinelerra-gg.org/goodguy/cinelerra.git cinelerra5

The source will be in a subdirectory cinelerra-5.1 of the directory created by the git clone operation.

If context-sensitive help is needed, download the manual sources too, with a different destination directory.

	git clone --depth 1 git://git.cinelerra-gg.org/goodguy/cin-manual-latex.git cin-manual-latex

Then move to the /{path to cinelerra-5.1/} directory.

There are two preliminaries to do before running the script:

1- If context sensitive help in the appimage version is required, the source of the manual and the tools (packages) to build it must be on the system. In the bld_appimage.sh script, set the variable MANUAL_DIRECTORY=$(pwd)/../../ cin-manual-latex to the path of the source of the manual. If the variable is empty, or the specified directory does not exist, CINELERRA-GG will be built without built-in help. The path to the manual source can be an absolute or relative one.

2- The script bld_appimage.sh uses a platform specific version of appimagetool so that it can create appimages for x86_64, i686, aarch64, or armv7l architecture. We need to add appimagetool-(platform).AppImage to the /{path to cinelerra- 5.1}/tools directory, or somewhere in your path. You can download the tool for your system (e.g. appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage) from git: https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases

Always remember to make it executable. The four supported platforms are:

• appimagetool-aarch64.AppImage
• appimagetool-armhf.AppImage
• appimagetool-i686.AppImage
• appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage

With the preparations done, let's go back to the bld_appimage.sh script.

Make the script executable if it isn't already:

chmod x+u bld_appimage.sh

Start the script with:

./bld_appimage.sh

The first part of the script customizes configure, depending on the architecture of our system. The next step compiles and installs CINELERRA-GG in the bin subdirectory. The third part creates the manual in HTML; It will be the basis for the context help (see Help and Context Help). The fourth part creates the directory /AppDir/usr, which is the basic structure of an appimage, and then populates it with the contents of /{path to cinelerra-5.1}/bin. Finally, the fifth step starts a script, called makeappimage, which points to bld.sh contained in /tools/makeappimagetool/.

The script specifies all executables that are part of CINELERRA-GG, so makeappimage can pick up dependencies. Any executable code in other places is not picked up. makeappimage will populate the AppDir directory, and then call the platform dependent appimagetool found in /{path to cinelerra-5.1}/tools.

At the end of the compilation there will be an appimage in the cinelerra-5.1 directory, which we can move and use.