Saturday 2 November 2013

Deploying Additional Packages to the Sailfish Emulator and SDK

Latest update is 24 Dec 2013 11:40 UK time.

One of the areas that raises the most questions on the Sailfish Developers' mailing list is the sticky topic of Installing additional packages to the Sailfish Emulator and SDK. Many developers, including myself have found installation very confusing.

The reasons for the confusion are clear: there is no official documentation on this topic yet, thought it is promised; there are a number of different ways that a package can be installed; both the Emulator and SDK may required installation; each package is available in a number of flavours; and then there is the challenge of identifying the correct package in the first page, and determining the correct name of that package. And if that was not enough, due to the refactoring of Qt Mobility from Qt 4 to Qt 5, some of our favourite components are now offered by quite different packages.

This post should give you a broad understanding of the different installation techniques. To those who live and breath Linux, who first compiled the kernel before they went to school, much of this may be obvious. To the rest of us from different development backgrounds it is less so, hence this post

We will look at zypper, PkCon, ScratchBox2, yaml and spectacle. We will find out how to install "by hand*, and automatically on building and running.