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Working with our Build System

Quick Guide to setting up a build system for your plugin

  1. Decide on a short name for your plugin. (ie: ezoom, move, resize).
  2. Create a directory, preferably using your short name.

  3. Copy our generic Makefile from http://cgit.compiz-fusion.org/fusion/misc/makefile/ . This is the same in all of the INDIVIDUAL plugin repositories.

  4. Create an empty plugin.info file. The only required variable here is: "PLUGIN = shortname"
  5. Create your shortname.c and shortname.xml.in

And that's it for the build system. You can now run "make" to build and "make install" to install to ~/.compiz.

Please not that we strongly advice developers to use GIT from day one. Getting your git repository hosted on compiz-fusion.org is easy.

Hints

If you need more from the build system, for instance dependencies, look at the Makefile. It has examples of commonly needed variables.

Never use the combined repositories to develop code (plugins-main, for instance). These are automatically merged from the individual repositories, and the build system set up to build those are outside the scope of this Wiki page. As a plugin-developer, you will not need to know how it works.

Do not modify the Makefile. If you find it lacking, then ask your fellow developers either on IRC or on the mailinglist. If you really did find a flaw in the Makefile, we will fix it globally.

If your plugin becomes an official part of Compiz Fusion, your Makefile is likely to become updated by the people who take care of the template. So your days of worrying about Makefiles are mostly over.