[Geany] Installing Geany-Plugins from Source in Debian

[Enrico Tröger]

 On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 02:32:54 -0500, Danny K wrote:
> Hi, I'm running Debian 5.0.6 "lenny". I downloaded the sources of
> Geany 0.19.1 and Geany-Plugins 0.19. I extracted Geany and ran
> ./configure, make, make install, and it worked. But I want to use the
> Geanygdb plugin. So after I extracted Geany-Plugins and ran
> ./configure, it said that it could not find Geany. So I uninstalled
> Geany and this time ran ./configure --prefix=/usr, make, make 
> install.
> I went back to Geany-Plugins and ran ./configure, make, make install

 In your first attempt, you installed Geany into /usr/local.
 When you configure the plugins, the build systems searches a
 so called pkgconfig file which was installed in
 /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig. But the default check for
 this pkgconfig file is mostly done in /usr.
 To get it working you had to set the following
 environment variable like this:
 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
 then the plugins' configure would have looked in
 /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig as well and found Geany.

 After you installed Geany in the prefix /usr, Geany's
 pkgconfig file was installed in the default pkgconfig
 search path (/usr/lib/pkgconfig) and so it worked.


> with apparently no errors. So I then run Geany again, but when I go 
> to
> Tools->Plugin Manager, it reports that no plugins are available.

 Hmm, hard to say so far.
 Probably there are linker problems or differences in the ABI.
 After you opened the plugin manager, could you check
 Help->Debug Messages? This should show some interesting messages.
 Simply copy them and append it to your reply, so we could check
 what's wrong.

 
> What is the correct way to install Geany-Plugins on Debian?

 The easiest and most dangerous way is to use the
 nightly builds from http://geany.nightlybuilds.org.
 But of course, these are nightly bcreated builds from
 the SVN version and so might be buggy or even broken,
 use at your own risk :).

 A more serious way and even close to the Debian way
 would be to backport the geany-plugins 0.19 package
 from Testing to Lenny (the package is in Testing
 since yesterday). But this needs to be done.

 I'd suggest to build from source as you did.


 Regards,
 Enrico