--------------------------------------
Installation instructions for GIMP 3.0
--------------------------------------

There are some basic steps to building and installing GIMP.

GIMP 3.0 replaces earlier GIMP 2.10.x versions. It is advised to
uninstall them before installing GIMP 3.0. Since libgimp* libraries
and data are all versioned anyway, it is possible to keep your older
GIMP 2.x installation in parallel to GIMP 3.0 on a same prefix.

GIMP 3.0 is not backward compatible with GIMP 2.10 and earlier
versions. Plug-ins and scripts written for GIMP 2.10, 2.8, 2.6 or
earlier GIMP 2.x versions will not work because the API changed.

The most important part is to make sure the requirements for a build
are fulfilled. We depend on a number of tools and libraries which are
listed below. For libraries this means you need to also have the
header files installed.

This file is generated (versions are filled by our build system) and
focuses on keeping an up-to-date list of dependencies intended to
packagers, contributors or whoever wants to compile GIMP from source.
Building and running self-built software often requires more setup, in
particular environment variables so that your system knows where to
find the various pieces of the software. The following document can
help in that regard:

  https://developer.gimp.org/core/setup/build/


  ******************************************************************
  * Unless you are experienced with building software from source, *
  * you should not attempt to build all these libraries yourself!  *
  * We suggest that you check if your distributor has development  *
  * packages of them and use these instead.                        *
  ******************************************************************


  1. You need to have installed a recent version of pkg-config available from:

       https://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/

     The compatible pkgconf utility would also work.

  2. You need gettext version 0.19.8 or newer. Older versions did not have support yet
     for certain file formats.

  3. You need to have GEGL version 0.4.62 or newer and babl version
     0.1.114 or newer. You can get them from https://gegl.org/ or clone
     them from the GNOME git repository:

       https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/babl.git
       https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gegl.git

     GEGL must be built with Cairo support, i.e. -Dcairo=enabled option (required
     for some mandatory operations such as "gegl:npd").

     Introspection must be enabled for both babl and GEGL with -Denable-gir=true
     and -Dintrospection=true respectively. The only case where we don't build
     GIR data is when cross-compiling because of the difficulty to make cross-tools
     for GObject Introspection.
     Nevertheless if you have working GIR cross-tools, you can force the expected
     behavior with GIMP's meson option -Dcan-crosscompile-gir=true

     Optional:

     - build GEGL with libumfpack (SuiteSparse) (`-Dumfpack=enabled`)
       for alternative Matting engine "gegl:matting-levin" and OpenEXR
       library (`-Dopenexr=enabled`) for OpenEXR format support.
     - build GEGL with maxflow (https://github.com/gerddie/maxflow) and
       the option -Dworkshop=true in order to be able to select the
       experimental Paint Select tool in the Playground (operation
       "gegl:paint-select" is needed).
     - The "Show Image Graph" item in the "Debug" menu (hidden by
       default on stable release) requires the GEGL operation
       "gegl:introspect" which is always built but deactivated unless
       the `dot` tool from graphviz is available (runtime dependency).

  4. You need to have installed GTK version 3.24.0 or newer.
     GIMP also needs a recent version of GLib (>= 2.70.0), GDK-Pixbuf
     (>= 2.30.8), and Pango (>= 1.50.0). Sources for these can be grabbed
     from https://download.gnome.org/sources/.

  5. We use cairo >= 1.14.0, which is hosted at
     https://www.cairographics.org/.

  6. We require PangoCairo, a Pango backend using Cairo. Make sure you
     have Cairo, FreeType2 and fontconfig installed before you compile
     Pango. GIMP depends on freetype2 being newer than version 2.1.7
     and fontconfig 2.12.4 or newer. Older versions are known to have
     bugs that seriously affect the stability of GIMP.

     On Windows, we recommend fontconfig 2.13.95 (or over) where support
     of fonts in user directory (Windows 1809 feature) appeared.

     We also require HarfBuzz 2.8.2 or newer, an OpenType text shaping
     tool. As this is a dependency for Pango, you will likely have it
     installed, but you may have to install a development package for
     the headers.

  7. The file-compressor plug-in requires zlib, libbzip2, and liblzma to
     be installed. All these libraries are required dependencies.

  8. For metadata access GIMP requires the gexiv2 0.14.0 or newer library.
     It is hosted at: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gexiv2/

  9. libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, librsvg and lcms are hard dependencies
     that can not be disabled. poppler is also a hard dependency because
     PDF is too common nowadays for it to be an option (at least for
     import); and poppler-data (CJK and Cyrillic support in PDF) is also
     required because no languages should be considered "second class
     citizen". If we support PDF, let's support it properly, i.e.
     exhaustively.

     There might be some issues with librsvg, based on the fact newer
     versions are in Rust which is not buildable on all platforms. Yet
     SVG support was deemed too important to be considered "optional"
     for a decent graphics activity. Nevertheless a packager really
     intent to have GIMP running on an architecture with no Rust support
     could still:

     1) easily patch out the file-svg plug-in from build system;
     2) build GIMP with -Dvector-icons=false. Ironically librsvg is
     needed at build time for this option, in order to create PNG
     variants of icons (making librsvg unneeded at runtime). So all it
     takes is to have a build machine with librsvg to create the PNG
     icons, package and deliver them for machines without librsvg.

     This is the compromise we came with, i.e. officially making SVG a
     first-class file format, yet explaining how you could ignore it if
     you really wanted or needed to.

 10. For MyPaint brushes, brushlib (libmypaint) 1.3.0 is used.
     The libmypaint repository is hosted at:

        https://github.com/mypaint/libmypaint

     If installing from repository, do not install the master branch!
     Checkout the last tag "v1.y.z" from `libmypaint-v1` branch instead
     (for instance "v1.6.1" tag at time of writing), or simply install
     from a tarball or from your favorite package manager.

     In particular, do NOT install tags or release tarballs versioned
     "v2.y.z". GIMP depends on the version 1 of libmypaint and is
     incompatible with the version 2 (which is still experimental anyway
     and has no stable release at time of writing).

 11. We also need the mypaint-brushes data package:

        https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint-brushes

     If installing from repository, install from branch "v1.3.x" or the
     last tag "v1.y.z" (e.g. "v1.3.1" at time of writing).
     In particular do NOT install from `master` branch which installs
     brushes incompatible with GIMP (the `master` branch and v2 brushes
     are targeted to software using recent libmypaint which GIMP wasn't
     ported to yet).

     Also this is a data packages and therefore it will install the
     pkg-config file inside `$PREFIX/share/pkgconfig/`. If you install
     mypaint-brushes from repository in a non-standard prefix, you will
     have to make sure your $PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable also
     lists `$PREFIX/share/pkgconfig/`.

 12. GIMP uses GLib's GIO library to handle file URIs and any I/O in
     general, transparently, regardless where the file is stored, i.e.
     locally, remotely, with which scheme, and so on. GIO in turn
     supports various backends through modules. We don't know all the
     modules available but since HTTP and HTTPS are so pervasive
     nowadays, we kind of consider a least GIO modules for these schemes
     mandatory (it allows to open from a pasted URL or just drag'n drop
     from e.g. a browser).

     For HTTP support (and many other schemes), on Linux at least, you
     should install `gvfs`:

        https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/

     It is unclear whether `gvfs` can be built and installed on other
     platforms such as Windows and macOS.

     For HTTPS support, you should install `glib-networking`:

        https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib-networking

     Of course there might be more modules providing support of more
     storage backends. Ideally GIMP would have support to load from any
     backend so packaging together with more GIO modules or recommending
     them in a package manager would be ideal. In any case, installing
     the ones for HTTP and HTTPS seems like the minimum nowadays.

 13. You may want to install other third party libraries or programs
     that are needed for some of the available plug-ins. We recommend
     to check that the following libraries are installed: openjpeg,
     libmng, libwmf, libaa and libgs (Ghostscript).

 14. HEIF support depends on the libheif library. If you don't have
     access to pre-built packages, the code is available at:

        https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

     GIMP supports several HEIF variants (different coding formats in
     the HEIF container), so you should make sure you build libheif with
     proper encoders and decoders for these:

     * HEIC: e.g. libde265 and libx265 support (for
             respectively decoding and encoding of HEVC).
     * AVIF: e.g. libaom decoder and encoder (for AV1 encoding and
             decoding), prefered over rav1e.
     * HEJ2: OpenJPEG (for JPEG2000 inside HEIF).

     If you don't compile libheif with the correct flags (see libheif
     README which has a table of supported codecs), the plug-in is
     mostly useless.
     If HEIF support doesn't look like it works on relocatable
     environments, the environment variable LIBHEIF_PLUGIN_PATH may be
     what you are looking for.

 15. GObject Introspection requires the following dependencies to be
     built and installed with introspection as well: babl, cairo,
     GdkPixbuf, GEGL, GIO, GLib, GObject and GTK.

 16. Windows builds can now generate backtrace logs upon a crash.
     The logs will be available in: %APPDATA%\GIMP@GIMP_APP_VERSION@\CrashLog\
     The feature depends on Dr.MinGW's ExcHndl library:

        https://github.com/jrfonseca/drmingw

 17. Optional step if compiling GIMP from git (unneeded from tarball): you need
     to initialize submodules with command `git submodule update --init`.

 18. Configure GIMP by running `meson _build`. You may want to pass some
     options to it, see below.

 19. Build GIMP by running `ninja -C _build'.

 20. Install GIMP by running `ninja -C _build install'. In order to
     avoid clashes with other versions of GIMP, we install a binary
     called gimp-3.0. By default there's also a link created so that
     you can type 'gimp' to start gimp-3.0.

 21. Summary of required packages and what version you need:

     Package Name         Version

     appstream-glib       0.7.7
     ATK                  2.4.0
     babl                 0.1.114
     cairo                1.14.0
     Fontconfig           2.12.4
     freetype2            2.1.7
     GDK-PixBuf           2.30.8
     GEGL                 0.4.62
     gexiv2               0.14.0
     GIO
     GLib                 2.70.0
     glib-networking
     GTK                  3.24.0
     gvfs (on Linux)
     HarfBuzz             2.8.2
     json-glib            1.2.6
     libarchive
     libbzip2
     libjpeg
     liblzma              5.0.0
     libmypaint           1.3.0
     libpng               1.6.25
     libpoppler-glib      0.69.0
     librsvg              2.40.6
     libtiff              4.0.0
     Little CMS           2.8
     mypaint-brushes-1.0
     pangocairo           1.50.0
     poppler-data         0.4.9
     PyGObject
     Python               >=3.6
     zlib

 22. Summary of optional packages:

     Package Name        Version        Feature

     cairo-pdf           1.12.2         PDF export
     cfitsio             -              FITS
     iso-codes           -              Language selection
     ExcHndl             -              Crash logs on Windows with Dr. MinGW
     gs                  -              ghostscript
     libaa               -              ASCII art
     libheif             1.15.1         HEIF (HEIC, AVIF)
     libilbm             -              Amiga IFF/ILBM
     libjxl              0.7.0          JPEG XL
     libmng              -              MNG
     libwebp             0.6.0          WebP (built with --enable-libwebpmux and --enable-libwebpdemux)
     libwmf              0.2.8          WMF
     libXcursor          -              X11 Mouse Cursor
     libxpm              -              XPM
     openexr             1.6.1          OpenEXR
     OpenJPEG            2.1.0          JPEG 2000
     qoi                 -              QOI
     webkit              2.20.3         Help browser & webpage
     vala                -              Vala plug-ins

 23. Summary of optional runtime dependencies:

     darktable >= 1.7, with lua support enabled for raw loading
     RawTherapee >= 5.2 for raw loading
     xdg-email for sending emails
     sendmail for sending emails if --with-sendmail enabled
     gdb or lldb for our new bug-reporting dialog
     "gegl:matting-levin" GEGL operation for alternative matting engine
     GJS for Javascript plug-ins
     dot for "Show Image Graph" (unstable branches)
     xdg-desktop-portal implemented for your desktop for various D-Bus API (screenshot, color-picking…)

 24. Summary of experimental or unmaintained dependencies:

     Lua 5.1 (or LuaJIT) and LGI: Lua plug-in example is disabled by
       default because of stability issues with the Lua binding.

     Webkit-GTK 2.20.3: the Help Browser and Webpage
       plug-ins are disabled for lack of maintenance and issues with
       Webkit-GTK



Generic instructions for configuring and compiling auto-configured
packages are included below. Here is an illustration of commands that
might be used to build and install GIMP. The actual configuration,
compilation and installation output is not shown.

  % tar xvf gimp-3.0.4.tar.xz   # unpack the sources
  % cd gimp-3.0.4               # change to the toplevel directory
  % meson setup _build              # `configure' step
  % ninja -C _build                 # build GIMP
  % ninja -C _build install         # install GIMP


The `configure' step examines your system, and adapts GIMP to run on
it. The script has many options, some of which are described in the
generic instructions included at the end of this file. All of the
options can be listed using the command `meson configure' if you
successfully configured already, or by reading the file `meson_options.txt`.
There are several special options the GIMP configure script recognizes.
These are:

  -Dvector-icons=false  This option installs raster icons instead of
     vector icons.

  -Drelocatable-bundle=yes  This option forces GIMP to search some
     resources (e.g. MyPaint brushes or libwmf fonts) relatively to the
     running prefix, rather than using build-time paths.

  -Dansi=true  This option causes stricter ANSI C checking to be
     performed when compiling with GCC. The default is for strict
     checking to be disabled. NOTE: This option is intended primarily as
     a convenience for developers.

  -Dgimpdir=DIR.  This option changes the default directory GIMP uses to
     search for its configuration files from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/GIMP/3.0/
     (per XDG Base Directory Specification, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to
     the directory .config/ in the user's home directory) to
     $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/DIR/3.0/.
     If DIR is an absolute path, the directory will be changed to DIR.

  -Dshmem-type=[none|sysv|posix|win32|auto].  This option allows you to
     specify how image data is transported between the core and plug-ins.
     Usually the best way to do this is detected automatically.

  -Daa=disabled  The AA plug-in needs libaa and configure checks for
     its presence. Use -Daa=disabled if you run into problems.

  -Dxpm=disabled  The XPM plug-in needs libxpm and configure checks
     for its presence. If for some reason you don't want to build the
     XPM plug-in even though the library is installed, use
     -Dxpm=disabled to disable it explicitly.

  -Dmng=disabled  The MNG plug-in needs libmng and configure checks
     for its presence. If for some reason you don't want to build the
     MNG plug-in even though the library is installed, use
     -Dmng=disabled to disable it explicitly.

  -Dwmf=disabled  The WMF plug-in needs libwmf2 and configure checks for
     its presence. Use -Dwmf=disabled if you run into problems.

  -Dwebkit-unmaintained=true  We do not recommend to install the Help
     browser and Webpage plug-ins anymore. If for some reason you want
     these anyway, you can force the build with this explicit option.

  -Dprint=false  If for some reason you don't want to build the Print
     plug-in based on the GtkPrint API, you can build with -Dprint=false.

  -Dalsa=disabled  If you don't want to compile ALSA support into the
     MIDI input controller module, you can use the -Dalsa=disabled option.

  -Dlinux-input=disabled  If you don't want to compile the Linux Input
     controller module, you can use the -Dlinux-input=disabled option.

  -Dgi-docgen=enabled|disabled  This option controls whether the libgimp
     C API references will be created using gi-docgen.

  -Denable-multiproc=false This option allows you to disable support for
     multiple processors. It is enabled by default.

  -Dwith-sendmail[=PATH] This option is used to tell GIMP to send email
     through sendmail instead of xdg-email. You can optionally indicate
     where to find the sendmail command. Otherwise sendmail will simply
     be searched in your $PATH at runtime.

  -Denable-default-bin=false  Use this option if you don't want to make
     gimp-3.0 the default GIMP installation. Otherwise a link called
     gimp pointing to the gimp-3.0 executable will be installed.

  -Denable-console-bin=false  Use this option if you don't want the
     gimp-console binary to be built in addition to the standard binary.
     gimp-console is useful for command-line batch mode or as a server.

  -Djavascript=disabled  If for some reason you don't want to install the
     JavaScript plug-ins, you can use -Djavascript=false.

  -Dlua=true  Lua binding is experimental because of stability issues.
     You may test the feature by enabling it.

  -Dvala-plugins=disabled  If for some reason you don't want to install the
     Vala plug-ins, you can use -Dvala-plugins=disabled.


This list is manually maintained. To get an exhaustive listing of options,
read `meson_options.txt'.
Additionally meson supports a wide range of common built-in options. See
documentation: https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html

The `ninja' command builds several things:
 - A bunch of public libraries in the directories starting with 'libgimp'.
 - The plug-in programs in the 'plug-ins' directory.
 - Some modules in the 'modules' subdirectory.
 - The main GIMP program 'gimp-3.0' in `app'.

The `ninja install' command installs the GIMP header files associated
with the libgimp libraries, the plug-ins, some data files and the GIMP
executable. After running `ninja install' and assuming the build process
was successful you should be able to run `gimp'.


When configure fails
======================

The most important is to read the error output displayed by meson, as it
will very likely tell you the exact problem.

A detailed log of the meson output is written to the file meson-logs/meson-log.txt.
This may help diagnose problems.

The configuration step verify that various tools are installed, such as:
C and C++ compilers, pkg-config or pkgconf (tools that replaces the old
foo-config scripts), and more. Make sure these are installed.

Then it will try to search for various libraries, by looking up a `.pc`
file (used to get information on installation details). For instance if
pkg-config could not find the file 'gtk+-3.0.pc' that gets installed
with GTK, verify that the development package of GTK+3 is installed or
that you have a version equal or higher than the required version.

If you installed a supported version of a dependency but the configure
step still cannot find it, you may need to add the location of the .pc
file to the environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH before running meson
setup.

When you use custom installation prefixes for dependencies, you will
likely need to set more environment variables, such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or GI_TYPELIB_PATH, either for the configuration to succeed, the build
itself or to start GIMP at all.
Please check out our building tutorial for more in-depth details:

  https://developer.gimp.org/core/setup/build/


About optional features
=======================

When the configure step succeeds, it will display a summary of which
optional features or plug-ins will be installed.

There are some GIMP features, in particular for the support of more
recent or less used image formats, that need additional third-party
libraries installed on your system. You need the related libraries and
header files installed for these, otherwise the compiled GIMP will be a
minimal version without these features.

Once you installed them, run the following command to trigger a
reconfiguration:

  % ninja reconfigure

Verify that the optional features you wanted are now shown as `true`,
otherwise follow similar advices than above to make sure they are
visible to your setup.