Building NvDialog

This document will provide you with all the necessary information / documentation to build NvDialog on your machine. These steps have been verified to work on all supported platforms, thanks to usage of cross-platform tools.

You can also download prebuilt binaries of NvDialog at the releases page. This can be useful if you are looking to package NvDialog with your application without extra compilation.

Dependencies

Before proceeding, download and install the following:

CMake
ninja
A C compiler (e.g. gcc or clang)
If you want to generate the documentation locally: doxygen

1. Downloading the source code.

Before continuing, you must acquire the source code somehow. How you will do that depends on what version you want to use:

The git development version is the one where all the development goes. You should avoid it unless you want early access to new features, since many things may stay broken there for some time
The releases provide you with the source code of each release. They're recommended for stability and future-proofness, as the final releases usually work with older versions.
Optionally, you can also download a specific branch if you're looking for an unfinished feature.

Each one will be explained below seperately:

Git

Open a terminal, and cd to the directory you want to store the source code. Then type the following two commands:

$ git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/tseli0s/nvdialog.git

$ cd nvdialog/

‍You can also have NvDialog as a submodule. Just use git submodule add </blockquote>https://github.com/tseli0s/nvdialog.git in your source code tree.

Releases

Go to https://github.com/tseli0s/nvdialog/releases/latest and download the source code as a zip file. Extract the archive where you want to store the source code.

Specific git branch

Same as the git one, but you must change the second command to this:

git clone --branch <branchname> --recursive

https://github.com/tseli0s/nvdialog.git

2. Building

Go to the directory the source code is located. You must have files like CMakeLists.txt, Makefile, CHANGELOG.md and others. > Don't confuse the said directory with the directory named src/. Source code in this case means the entire NvDialog folder.

Then, generate the build files, necessary to build the source code:

$ cmake . -B build/ -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

‍You can optionally tweak NvDialog's default settings using the

-D<var>=<value> CMake flag.

Finally, building the source code is relatively simple:

ninja

The build takes at most 1 minute.

If you want to install NvDialog on your computer (You probably do), then run this command as well:

$ sudo ninja install # sudo may be omitted on Windows and macOS

Older distros

For older Linux distros that don't have a recent enough version of CMake, there's a Makefile provided. You can just run make && sudo make install and it should do the exact same thing. The downside is that the Makefile doesn't support any options - You will have to modify it manually to tweak any build time functionality.

Compile-time features:

This is a table of features that NvDialog supports enabling at compile time. You can enable features (Or set them appropriately) using the -D<feature>=<value> cmake flag.

Feature	Default	Description
CROSS_COMPILE_FOR_WIN32	OFF	Cross compile from a Unix system for a Windows host
NVD_BUILD_STATIC	ON	Build NvDialog as a static library instead, that will be packaged with your executable
NVD_GENERATE_DOCS	OFF	Generate the documentation pages along with the source code (Requires doxygen)
NVD_IMAGE_SUPPORT	ON	Include support for images in the library.
NVD_USE_GNUSTEP	OFF	Use the GNUstep+Cocoa backend if available on non-macOS platforms. Experimental.