Compiling Scribus from Source

Out of source builds

One of the advantages of CMake is that you can do an out-of-source build. What is this? It enables you to build the application without writing anything at all to the directory where the Scribus source is. This means your source tree is clean, always. Its easier and faster to update, and you can build multiple targets out-of-source from the same source tree. Cool!

To do an out-of-source build, you need a new directory to build in. Say you have the source files in:

/home/username/scribus-test/Scribus

Make the following directory:

/home/username/scribus-test/bin

So then, instead of doing the following within /home/username/scribus-test/Scribus:

cmake .

you would then change to the /home/username/scribus-test/bin directory and run:

cmake ../Scribus -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/username/scribus-test/bin/

Simple!