Developer Notes

This page is specifically for people who wish to make code changes, build the files after making their changes, and to potentially share their changes back with the project.

TODO Update for new build process

Perl is no longer required for building. Go, however, is. Getting Go installed and the fsbuilder tool built is much simpler (and faster) than all the Perl dependencies. We've also stopped depending on tidy, uglify, etc - the savings to the average user is just not worth it. As such the build process now runs in seconds.

TODO jfesler is to update these instructions, hopefully by 2016-03-26.

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Required Software

In addition to the installation requirements.. you'll additionally need:

• Perl's Template module http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/module/Template . This is used to combine source files to produce the distributable HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
• htmltidy - http://tidy.sourceforge.net
• nodejs - http://nodejs.org
• npm (node package installer) - https://www.npmjs.org/doc/README.html
• uglify for Javascript https://www.npmjs.org/package/uglify-js
• cssmin for JavaScript https://www.npmjs.org/package/cssmin

Source code

You'll need at least these repositories:

• https://github.com/falling-sky/source (if working on javascript or translations)
• https://github.com/falling-sky/dist_support (if packaging)
• https://github.com/falling-sky/mod_ip (if working on the apache module)
• https://github.com/falling-sky/extras (if working on charting)

Other Requirements

You'll need an excess of hair to pull out.

Christian Schmidt reports that on his system (Debian Squeeze) he had to install and configure the locale. This may affect other distributions as well.

> It is UTF 8, but at some point the installation process wrecked the
> special characters (made ??? in the .js-files). I just had default
> locales installed. After a short apt-get install locales, and selection
> of an UTF8 locale (mine: de_DE-UTF8) everthing worked like a charm.