This commit probably comes as a surprise to some, given that one of i3’s
explicitly stated goals used to be “Do not use programs such as
autoconf/automake for configuration and creating unreadable/broken makefiles”.
I phrased this goal over 7 years ago, based largely on a grudge that I
inherited, which — as I’ve realized in the meantime — was largely held against
FOSS in general, and not actually nuanced criticism of autotools.
In the meantime, I have come to realize that the knee-jerk reaction of “I could
do this better!” (i.e. writing our own build system in this particular case) is
usually misguided, and nowadays I strongly suggest trying hard to fix the
existing system for the benefit of all existing and future users.
Further, I recently got to experience the other side of the coin, as I packaged
a new version of FreeRADIUS for Debian, which at the time of writing used
autoconf in combination with boilermake, a custom make-based build system that
only FreeRADIUS uses. Understanding the build system enough to fix issues and
enable parallel compilation took me an entire day. That time is time which
potentially every downstream maintainer needs to invest, and the resulting
knowledge cannot be applied to any other project.
Hence, I believe it’s a good idea switch i3 to autotools. Yes, it might be that
particular features were easier to implement/understand in our custom
Makefiles, and there might be individuals who have an easier time reading
through our custom Makefiles than learning autotools. All of these
considerations are outweighed by the benefits we get from using the same build
system as literally thousands of other FOSS software packages.
Aside from these somewhat philosophical considerations, there’s also practical
improvements which this change brings us. See the “changes” section below.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ new workflow │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
You can now build i3 like you build any other software package which uses
autotools. Here’s a memory refresher:
autoreconf -fi
mkdir -p build && cd build
../configure
make -j8
(The autoreconf -fi step is unnecessary if you are building from a release
tarball, but shouldn’t hurt either.)
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ recommended reading │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
I very much recommend reading “A Practitioner's Guide to GNU Autoconf,
Automake, and Libtool” by John Calcote (https://www.nostarch.com/autotools.htm).
That book is from 2010 and, AFAICT, is the most up to date comprehensive
description of autotools. Do not read older documentation. In particular, if a
document you’re reading mentions configure.in (deprecated filename) or
recursive make (now considered harmful), it’s likely outdated.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ changes │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
This commit implements the following new functionality/changes in behavior:
• We use the AX_ENABLE_BUILDDIR macro to enforce builds happening in a separate
directory. This is a prerequisite for the AX_EXTEND_SRCDIR macro and building
in a separate directory is common practice anyway. In case this causes any
trouble when packaging i3 for your distribution, please let me know.
• “make check” runs the i3 testsuite.
You can still use ./testcases/complete-run.pl to get the interactive progress
output.
• “make distcheck” (runs testsuite on “make dist” result, tiny bit quicker
feedback cycle than waiting for the travis build to catch the issue).
• “make uninstall” (occasionally requested by users who compile from source)
• “make” will build manpages/docs by default if the tools are installed.
Conversely, manpages/docs are not tried to be built for users who don’t want
to install all these dependencies to get started hacking on i3.
• non-release builds will enable address sanitizer by default. Use the
--disable-sanitizers configure option to turn off all sanitizers, and see
--help for available sanitizers.
• Support for pre-compiled headers (PCH) has been dropped for now in the
interest of simplicitly. Maybe we can re-add it later.
• coverage reports are now generated using “make check-code-coverage”, which
requires specifying --enable-code-coverage when calling configure.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ build system feature parity/testing │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
In addition to what’s described above, I tested the following features:
• “make install” installs the same files (plus documentation and manpages)
cd i3-old && make install PREFIX=/tmp/inst/old
cd i3-new && ./configure --prefix=/tmp/inst/new
cd /tmp/inst
(cd old && for f in $(find); do [ -e "../new/$f" ] || echo "$f missing"; done)
• make dist generates a tarball which includes the same files
cd i3-old && make dist
cd i3-new/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu && make dist
colordiff -u <(tar tf i3-old/i3-4.12.tar.bz2 | sort) \
<(tar tf i3-new/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/i3-4.12.tar.gz | sort)
There are some expected differences:
• Some files have been renamed (e.g. the new etc/ and share/ subdirectories)
• Some files will now be generated at build-time, so only their corresponding
.in file is shipped (e.g. testcases/complete-run.pl)
• The generated parser files are shipped in the dist tarball (they only
depend on the parser-specs/* files, not on the target system)
• autotools infrastructure is shipped (e.g. “configure”, “missing”, etc.)
• DLOG and ELOG statements still produce the same file name in logfiles
• Listing source code in gdb still works.
• gdb backtraces contain the i3-<version> path component
• release.sh still works
• version embedding
1. git checkout shows “4.12-136-gf720023 (2016-10-10, branch "autotools")”
2. tarball of a git version shows “4.12-non-git”
3. release tarball shows 4.13
• debug mode is enabled by default for non-release builds
• enabling verbose builds via V=1
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ speed │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
There is no noticeable difference in compilation speed itself (of binaries,
documentation and manpages):
i3-old $ time make all docs mans -j8
make all docs mans -j8 28.92s user 2.15s system 640% cpu 4.852 total
i3-new $ time make -j8
make -j8 27.08s user 1.92s system 620% cpu 4.669 total
In terms of one-time costs:
configuring the build system (../configure) takes about 2.7s on my machine,
generating the build system (autoreconf -fi) takes about 3.1s on my machine.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ m4 macros │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
All files in m4/ have been copied from the autoconf-archive package in version
b6aeb1988f4b6c78bf39d97b6c4f6e1d594d59b9 and should be updated whenever they
change.
This commit has been tested with autoconf 2.69 and automake 1.15.
Some tray clients such as VLC use override_redirect on their tray window. As per
specification this means i3bar won't receive a ConfigureRequest, but instead a
ResizeRequest will be triggered. If not selected, the X server will simply confirm
the request which leads to a broken tray window size.
This commit selects and handles the event just like a configure request is handled.
fixes#2494
When I3SOCK is present, socket_path might be a pointer to an
environment variable, which cannot be free'd in line 157. This
commit duplicates the string if I3SOCK is present, thus making
socket_path a free-able pointer again.
This commit removes an unnecessary fallback to the first output's name as
this name ("first") will only be used to see whether "tray_output none"
has been specified, anyway.
We also add documentation that clearly states when we want to initialize
the tray and when we don't want to do the same.
relates to #2220
This commit removes the code for falling back to the first available
output for the system tray if 'tray_output primary' has been specified
but there is no primary output (managed by this bar).
This fallback behavior was broken/unreachable because the tray
will never be initialized in this situation in the first place. Having
this dead code lead to a wrong assumption in #1855 and hence to
commit e2e7b70d00, which makes the
system tray not show up for many users when first installing i3.
Thanks to @rtlanceroad for reporting this issue.
fixes#2220
This allows "modifier none" (and "modifier off") for the bar config
in order to disable the modifier key altogether. This is useful
for users who use a different approach to hiding / showing the bar,
e.g., a custom keybind that involved multiple keys or scripts.
fixes#2208
This disables the default leak-check-on-exit behavior which reports a
bunch of leaks that are only leaks while exiting, at which point they
don’t matter, because the operating system will clean up the memory our
process used.
This patch moves the title_format information from windows to containers.
Furthermore, it allows correctly setting it on window-less containers and
displays the title accordingly for split containers.
We now also dump and read title_format in GET_TREE / during restarts.
fixes#2120
Even if the X11 root window cursor is not set up correctly for some
reason, with this fix, users should at least see the correct cursor when
the pointer is over i3bar.
see issue #2114
This patch migrates all decoration rendering of i3 to cairo. Using the
compile switch CAIRO_SUPPORT, rendering can be switched back to the
previous XCB behavior, just like with the previous migration to cairo
in i3bar.
This patch also fixes a bug in draw_util.c where copying one surface
to another would use incorrect coordinates if the source coordinates
are not 0, 0.
Furthermore, this patch implicitly fixes some minor issues in the
decoration rendering which would be ignored previously due to the fact
that errors would only show up in the event queue, but not cause the
rendering code path to crash. One example is zero-height pixmaps which
are not allowed. Using cairo, these would cause i3 to instantly segfault,
so this patch avoids this.
Lastly, this patch annotates other issues found but not fixed in this patch
using TODO comments, e.g., the zero-height check not working correctly
and the comment that it should probably work the same way for zero-width
pixmaps.
relates to #1278
In order to prepare for using cairo for rendering i3 decorations,
we need to make the draw_util.c from i3bar available via libi3 such
that both i3bar and i3 can use it.
relates to #1278
This patch introduces the possibility to specify the tray_output directive
multiple times. All values will be used by i3bar, in the order they are
given.
This way, a single bar configuration can be used for several machines with
internal output names "eDP1" and "LVDS-0" by specifying tray_output for both.
Any external output (e.g., "DP-0") will still not receive the tray. The same
effect can be achieved by using "primary", but forces the user to couple the
tray display to the primary output which may not be desirable behavior.
relates to #555
This patch adds two new status block keys, background and border, which
define the respective colors for the status block. If not specified, the
current behavior is kept, e.g., no background / border will be drawn.
If the status block is marked urgent, the urgent color is prioritized.
fixes#2022
This commit restores the old XCB drawing code paths while keeping the
cairo drawing available via a compile-time switch (I3BAR_CAIRO). This
is necessary as cairo currently has a bug that breaks i3bar for users
without the RENDER extension, which might be the case, e.g., for VNC
users.
For more context, see #1989 and the discussions about its fix. Once the
cairo fix is available in a stable release, i3 can depend on that version
and remove the XCB drawing code paths.
fixes#1989
This commit refactors the i3bar drawing code to also define an abstraction
function for clearing a surface. This is needed to fully abstract i3bar/xcb.c's
drawing code so that we can introduce a switch to easily exchange the
underlying drawing mechanism.
This introduces the flag "--pango" on the mode config directive to
explicitly enable pango markup for mode names. Not setting this will
cause the mode name to be rendered as is.
This fixes a regression in 4.11 where mode names containing characters
such as '<' would break user's configs as they didn't escape these
characters.
fixes#1992
Since libi3 currently creates its own cairo surface for drawing text, we
need to mark our own surface as dirty to force cairo to invalidate its
cache. Otherwise, this will result in graphical glitches such as the text
not showing up at all.
This wrapper can be removed in the future when libi3 is adapted to reuse
the same cairo surface as we do for all other drawing operations.
This patch creates all necessary windows for i3bar with 32-bit visuals if available.
It also introduces the possibility to define RGBA colors (next to RGB colors), which
allows the user to set the opacity of any color. This requires running a compositor.
With this patch we also start supporting _NET_SYSTEM_TRAY_VISUAL, which is necessary
for the tray icons so they create the tray window with the correct depth and visual.
Michael Stapelberg