Difficulty with building sigil 0.9.0 on linux

[philja]

To Kevin : I had noticed over the past year that I practically always had to find a xxx-dev to go with package xxx that was already present. I now learn from your post the reason - separation of headers from guts.
To eschwartz : yes I looked at the evolutionary process. I also read another lengthy thread on this forum about linux / windows etc.

I don't mind a bit of tinkering with the innards but really my prime interest in a computer device is getting it to do some job I have in mind. So I prefer (and hope for) installations to be as painless and quick as possible.

I started out wanting to turn my recently written (paper) book into an ebook. I saw that sigil was a recommended tool so went to look at its website. I initially saw hostility towards linux and its distros and was disappointed although I could understand and appreciate the rationale of the writer.

So I installed and worked with Calibre on my UbuntuStudio desktop - easy installation directly from Calibre's website. Despite lots of stuff I saw written about the poor state of its html editor, I must say that I found it pretty good and the work I had to do, although lengthy, was pretty straightforward.

After completing the epub on Calibre, validating it on idpf.org and building a mobi with kindlegen, I thought this week that I would have a relook at Sigil.

The rest of the story is contained on this thread and the other thread with the pre-compiled deb package. In the first hour of Sigil 0.8.6 installed from the deb package, I had rebuilt my ncx file into something I preferred and had formed a distinctly favourable impression of the power of sigil as a production tool.

So I am happily impressed now with both Calibre and Sigil and I've learned a bit more about linux, along the way. Can't be bad.

[eschwartz]

Ah yes -- the Sigil-linux hostility.

Overrated, if you ask me. Mostly just a severe disappointment in Debian. As you saw, Sigil works fine on linux, except when distros refuse to package it...

...

Save ArchLinux for when you have time to spare for fiddling around.

[AlPe]

Speaking of issues building Sigil 0.9.0 from source on Debian (Jessie):

I built Sigil 0.9.0 from source following https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil...dingOnLinux.md (using the Release ZIP, not cloning from GitHub), and the cmake -> make -> make install completed without a problem.

When I launch the compiled sigil executable I get a dialog saying "error in xmlprocessor repairXML" (which I believe comes from: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil...ource.cpp#L103 ). It seems a problem running Python and/or BeautifulSoup.

So I tried:

1. setting explicitly the CMAKE options for Python paths (since my default Python is 2.7, albeit CMAKE picked Python 3.4 correctly at the first try)

2. building in a virtualenv with Python 3.4 only

3. installing into a local, unprivileged directory instead of the default /usr/... privileged directory

but in all cases I get the same error.

BeautifulSoup (and all the other suggested Python modules) are installed and available for Python 3.4, I tried importing them one by one and they work in the Python interpreter.

The only difference w.r.t. the guide is that I am using Qt5.5.1, installed in /opt/ using the graphical installer.

Any ideas?

[KevinH]

If python 3.4 exists on your system and the headers for it are installed and found properly, all should work.

Exactly where is python 3.4 installed on your system, and what exact cmake command did you use?

[AlPe]

Mmm... while I was writing, I tried a 4th option:

4. compiling in a virtualenv, after clearing the pip(3) cache

and now Sigil gets compiled and starts normally.

Probably a problem with the cached bs4 (?). Never mind, not a Sigil bug.

[DiapDealer]

BeautifulSoup isn't necessary externally any more since v0.9.0. Sigil includes its own modified version of bs4. But it should affect nothing if you install it.

#1 shouldn't be necessary. Sigil won't build against a version of Python it can't use (3.4 or higher only)
#2 will probably not work (not entirely sure, but still ... wouldn't recommend it).
#3 shouldn't be any different than installing to any other prefix, I do it quite regularly.

You are launching Sigil via the bash script (installed in <install_prefix>/bin), right? Not the executable in <install_prefix>/lib/sigil/

[AlPe]

After clearing the pip(3) cache I got it to compile and run (yes, <prefix>/bin/sigil) as expected.

Much ado about nothing, I should have waited 10 minutes more before posting... it is always that way...