Confused about dev workflow

[sebastinas]

On GitLab by @xezav on Mar 24, 2024, 24:46

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Hey there,

I wanted to see if I could figure out what is wrong in #388. I want to bisect zathura, girara, and/or zathura-pdf-poppler in various combinations to try and pinpoint exactly when the problem started. (Or, if the problem is still there on very old versions like from 2022, then it would help attribute the issue to tabbed instead of zathura etc.)

To test each step in the bisections, I want to install everything into a custom directory like ~/tmp/zathura under my home directory. This way my test versions don't clobber the system-wide version of zathura installed by my package manager.

However, I am having trouble getting everything to compile properly. There is one particular error which is proving to be quite stubborn when I run my dev zathura:

error: Could not load plugin '/home/XXXXXXXXXXX/tmp/zathura/lib64/libpdf-poppler.so' (/home/XXXXXXXXXXX/tmp/zathura/lib64/libpdf-poppler.so: undefined symbol: zathura_signature_info_free).
error: Found no plugins. Please install at least one plugin.

I understand I may just be doing something dumb because I'm not familiar with meson/ninja. However, I've referred to the existing documentation, and also had a look over the gitlab-ci files to see if they have any hints, and nothing seems to help.

I wondered if it would be possible for the current developers to add a HACKING.md or similar, which would explain how to create development versions like this without clobbering system-wide installations, as well as any other notes about development workflows and so on?

[sebastinas]

On GitLab by @gi1242 on Mar 24, 2024, 23:11

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I second adding build / debug instructions. I was doing something similar and got the same error. In this case you can fix it by invoking it as:

ZATHURA_PLUGINS_PATH=/usr/lib/zathura zathura

Alternately you can use the -p option to specify the location of the plugin path. Not perfect, but good enough that I could run it and debug the issue I was having.