If you’re building for Windows you’ll want to have a look at the building on Windows page instead.
Pidgin’s default build has a lot of dependencies. This document will hopefully help you find and install them all.
These dependencies are ones that should be found in your distribution’s package manager.
Assuming you have all of the necessary libraries and their headers installed (see the next few questions), you compile libpurple, Pidgin and Finch just like most applications:
$ tar xjvf pidgin-2.x.y.tar.bz2
$ cd pidgin-2.x.y
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install
This will install libpurple, Pidgin and Finch to /usr/local. If you want to
install it elsewhere, pass --prefix=/some/other/prefix to ./configure. (You
really don’t want to install it to /usr.) See ./configure --help for other
options you can change at compile-time.
If you got the source tree from our Mercurial database (which you probably
shouldn’t have), you’ll need to run ./autogen.sh instead of ./configure the
first time around. If you get an error like the following, you may need a newer
version of automake.
running /usr/bin/automake -a -c --gnu... failed.
Makefile.am:79: directory should not contain `/'
pidgin/pixmaps/Makefile.am:4: directory should not contain `/'
If you are trying to compile on Windows, you need the answer to a different question.
You’re probably missing some dependencies. The configure script will tell you
when you are missing required dependencies. Remember that if you’re using an
RPM-based (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SUSE, Mandriva, etc.) or
Debian-based system (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) that having just a library’s package
installed is not sufficient–you must also have the -devel (RPM systems) or
-dev (Debian-based systems) package for each library installed. If configure
is succeeding, but make fails, this is harder to diagnose and you will
probably want to drop by the IRC channel or XMPP conference listed on
the Contact page to get help.
You need to install the development headers; these are the -dev packages. A
simple apt-get build-dep pidgin will find and install all of the required
header packages for you.
If apt-get build-dep fails with a message like
E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list
then you need to add deb-src lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list
corresponding to each of the deb lines already there. If editing configuration
files scares you, Ubuntu has a “Software Sources” control panel in System ->
Administration which has some magic checkboxes to do this for you.
RPM-based distribution users may find yum-builddep pidgin
useful if a source RPM is available and the distribution uses the yum tools.
Note that on current Fedora, you would use dnf builddep pidgin, which is in
the dnf-plugins-core package. If you’re still using yum, the yum-builddep
command is in the yum-utils package, which is not necessarily installed by
default.
Type patch -p1 < something.diff from the top level of the source directory
(pidgin/, not pidgin/pidgin/ or pidgin/finch/).
There are actually two ways:
./configure with the --with-static-prpls option with the
--disable-plugins option. This will let you choose which protocols to
include by specifying them as a comma-separated list, such as the following
(but note that you won’t be able to use any other protocols or plugins):
./configure --disable-plugins --with-static-prpls=irc,bonjour--with-dynamic-prpls option to ./configure by specifying a
comma-separated list, like so: ./configure --with-dynamic-prpls=irc,xmppSure. Pass --disable-gtkui to ./configure.