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Building and Packaging Quaternion

license CI Status PRs Welcome

Getting the source code

The source code is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion. The best way for one-off building is checking out a tag for a given release from GitHub (make sure to pass --recurse-submodules to git checkout if you use Option 2 - see below). If you plan to work on Quaternion code, feel free to fork/clone the repo and base your changes on the master branch.

Quaternion needs libQuotient to build. There are two options to use the library:

  1. Use a library installation known to CMake - either as a package available from your package repository (possibly but not necessarily system-wide), or as a result of building the library from the source code in another directory. In the latter case CMake internally registers the library upon succesfully building it so you shouldn't even need to pass CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH (still better do pass it, to avoid surprises).
  2. As a Git submodule. If you haven't cloned Quaternion sources yet, the following will get you all sources in one go: 
    git clone --recursive https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion.git
    If you already have cloned Quaternion, do the following in the top-level directory (NOT in lib subdirectory): 
    git submodule init
git submodule update
    In either case here, to correctly check out a given tag or branch, make sure to also check out submodules: 
    git checkout --recurse-submodules <ref>

Depending on your case, either option can be preferrable. General guidance is:

  • Option 1 is strongly recommended for packaging and also good for development on Quaternion without changing libQuotient;
  • Option 2 is better for one-off building and for active development when both Quaternion and libQuotient get changed.

These days Option 2 is used by default (with a fallback to Option 1 if no libQuotient is found under lib/). To override that you can pass USE_INTREE_LIBQMC option to CMake: -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=0 (or NO, or OFF) will force Option 1 (using an external libQuotient even when a submodule is there). The other way works too: if you intend to use libQuotient from the submodule, pass -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=1 (or YES, or ON) to make sure the build configuration process fails instead of finding an external libQuotient somewhere when a submodule is unusable for some reason (e.g. when --recursive has been forgotten when cloning).

(Why LIBQMC, you ask? Because the old name of libQuotient was libQMatrixClient and this particular variable still wasn't updated. This might be the last place using the old name.)

Pre-requisites

  • a recent Linux, macOS or Windows system (desktop versions tried; mobile platforms might work too but never tried)
    • Recent enough Linux examples: Debian Bookworm; Fedora 39 or CentOS Stream 9; OpenSUSE Leap 15.6; Ubuntu 24.04 (noble)
  • Qt 6.4 or newer (either Open Source or Commercial)
  • CMake 3.16 or newer (from your package management system or the official website)
  • A C++ toolchain with solid C++20 support and elements of C++23:
    • GCC 13 (Windows, Linux, macOS), Clang 16 (Linux), Apple Clang 15 (macOS) and Visual Studio 2022 (Windows) are the oldest officially supported.
  • Any build system that works with CMake should be fine: GNU Make, ninja (any platform), NMake, jom (Windows) are known to work.
  • optionally, development files for libQuotient 0.9.2 or newer (from your package management system), or prebuilt libQuotient (see "Getting the source code" above); libQuotient 0.8.x is not compatible with any Quaternion 0.0.97 release.
  • libQuotient dependendencies (see lib/README.md):
    • Qt Keychain
    • libolm 3.2.5 or newer (the latest 3.x strongly recommended)
    • OpenSSL 3.x (the version Quaternion runs with must be the same as the version used to build Quaternion - or libQuotient, if libQuotient is built/installed separately).

Linux

Just install things from the list above using your preferred package manager. If your Qt package base is fine-grained you might want to take a look at CMakeLists.txt to figure out which specific libraries Quaternion uses (or blindly run cmake and look at error messages). Note also that you'll need several Qt Quick plugins for Quaternion to work (without them, it will compile and run but won't show the messages timeline).

On Debian/Ubuntu, the following line should get you everything necessary to build and run Quaternion:

sudo apt-get install cmake qt6-declarative-dev qt6-base-private-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools qt6-l10n-tools qml6-module-qtquick-controls qt6-multimedia-dev qtkeychain-qt6-dev libolm-dev libssl-dev

On Fedora, the following command should be enough for building and running:

sudo dnf install cmake qt6-qtdeclarative-devel qt6-qtbase-private-devel qt6-qtmultimedia-devel qt6-qttools-devel qtkeychain-qt6-devel libolm-devel openssl-devel

macOS

brew install qt qtkeychain libolm openssl should get you Qt 6, the matching build of QtKeychain, and good versions of E2EE dependencies. You have to point CMake at the installation locations for your libraries, e.g. by adding $(brew --prefix qt) and similar for other libraries to the first cmake invocation, as follows:

# if using in-tree libQuotient:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$(brew --prefix qt);$(brew --prefix qtkeychain)$(brew --prefix libolm);$(brew --prefix openssl)"
# or otherwise:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="/path/to/libQuotient;$(brew --prefix qt);$(brew --prefix qtkeychain)$(brew --prefix libolm);$(brew --prefix openssl)"

Windows

  1. Install CMake. The commands in further sections imply that cmake is in your PATH - otherwise you have to prepend them with actual paths.
  2. Install Qt 6, using their official installer.
  3. Make sure CMake knows about Qt and the toolchain - the easiest way is to run qtenv*.bat script that can be found in C:\Qt\<Qt version>\<toolchain>\bin (assuming you installed Qt to C:\Qt). The only thing it does is adding necessary paths to PATH - you might not want to run it on system startup but it's very handy to setup environment before building. Setting CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH also helps.
  4. Get and build Qt Keychain.
  5. Install E2EE dependencies as described in lib/README.md, section "Building the library".

Build

In the root directory of the project sources:

mkdir build_dir
cd build_dir
cmake .. # Pass -D<variable> if needed, see below
cmake --build . --target all

This will get you an executable in build_dir inside your project sources. Noteworthy CMake variables that you can use:

  • -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path - add a path to CMake's list of searched paths for preinstalled software (Qt, libQuotient, QtKeychain); multiple paths are separated by ; (semicolons).
  • -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path - controls where Quaternion will be installed (see below on installing from sources).
  • -DUSE_INTREE_LIBQMC=<ON|OFF> - force using/not-using the in-tree copy of libQuotient sources (see "Getting the source code" above).

Install

In the root directory of the project sources: cmake --build build_dir --target install.

Building as Flatpak

If you run Linux and your distribution supports flatpak, you can easily build and install Quaternion as a flatpak package. Make sure to have flatpak-builder installed and then do the following:

# Optionally, get the source code if not yet
git clone https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion.git --recursive
cd Quaternion/flatpak
./setup_runtime.sh
./build.sh
flatpak --user install quaternion-nightly io.github.quotient_im.Quaternion

Whenever you want to update your Quaternion package, do the following from the flatpak directory:

./build.sh
flatpak --user update

Be mindful that since Quaternion 0.0.97 the Flatpak app-id has changed: before it used to be com.github.quaternion, now it's io.github.quotient_im.quaternion, to align with Flathub verification rules. Normally, Flatpak should seamlessly handle an upgrade; if it doesn't, make an issue at either the main Quaternion repo (https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion) or at the Quaternion Flatpak repo (https://github.com/flathub/io.github.quotient_im.Quaternion) - we'll route it as needed.

Troubleshooting

If cmake fails with...

CMake Warning at CMakeLists.txt:11 (find_package):
  By not providing "FindQt5Widgets.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project
  has asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by
  "Qt5Widgets", but CMake did not find one.

...or a similar error referring to Qt5Something - make sure that your CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH actually points to the location where Qt is installed and that the respective development package is installed (hint: check which package provides cmake(Qt5Widgets), replacing Qt5Widgets with what your error says).

If cmake fails with...

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:30 (add_subdirectory):
  The source directory

    <quaternion-source-directory>/lib

  does not contain a CMakeLists.txt file.

...then you don't have libQuotient sources - most likely because you didn't do the git submodule init && git submodule update dance and don't have libQuotient development files elsewhere - also, see the beginning of this file.

If you have made sure that your toolchain is in order (versions of compilers and Qt are among supported ones, PATH is set correctly etc.) but building fails with strange Qt-related errors such as not found symbols or undefined references (like in this issue, e.g.), double-check that you don't mix different versions of Qt. If you need those packages reinstalling them may help; but if you use that other Qt version by default to build other projects, you have to explicitly pass the location of the non-default Qt installation to CMake (see notes about CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH in "Building").

See also the Troubleshooting section in README.md