Making KIPI plugins

So I'm going to create a plugin for my photo organizing program, KPhotoAlbum^?. This pugin will allow me to experiment with various ways of measuring relative sharpness of an image, in order to automatically find the sharpest of a series of images of the same subject (similar to what my old Coolpix 955 did, called "Best Shot Selector"). It's a way to fake image stabilization -- any time you take a series of handheld pictures right after each other, some will be more shaken than others, and some might even be acceptably still. Great for when you can't use a tripod for one reason or the other. But I digress. Here will be the notes of my journey.

Step one: Compiling Hello, World

According to [[http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.5-api/extragear-libs-apidocs/libkipi/html/][the libkipi tutorials], the easy starting point is existing source, namely the Hello, World KIPI plugin.

I downloaded these pieces into the Plugins subdirectory of the KPhotoAlbum^? SVN tree, in a separate directory called Histogram.

After that, I modified the Makefile.am in the Plugins directory, adding SUBDIRS = Histogram.

Then I added kphotoalbum/Plugins/Histogram/Makefile to the top-level configure.in in the AC_CONFIG_FILES section.

I then ran autoreconf to get the new Makefile.am ready. A bunch of warnings were issued, but none that looked critical or pertaining to me.

Next up was ./configure. The Makefile got generated, so that's good.

Now on to compiling. At this point, it occurs to me that I should have compiled before adding my own stuff -- some other code is broken. Out to do svn up, autoreconf, ./configure and then make again.

Trying to get around that, I go into the Plugins directory and make. Complains about missing .moc file. Use moc plugin_helloworld.h > plugin_helloworld.moc to generate it.

Do make again and it compiles! Now time to try a make distclean && ./configure && make on the whole thing to try to get around the other compile failure. Actually, right thing is make distclean && ./configure && cd kphotoalbum && make since some of the other things break for reasons I don't care about. No luck with that, though.

The right thing to do is make -f Makefile.cvs before ./configure && cd kphotoalbum && make. This makes it compile, and my little plugin with it.

Starting up KPhotoAlbum^? (which is fast now!) shows... no plugin! Should have been in misc under the Plugins, but nothing. Adding a printf() call shows it's not initialized, even when I do a make install (which does install it).

-- LarsClausen - 28 Jan 2007
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