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Building Being able to building Gramps from scratch (from the fundamental Python scripts) is useful to produce a version not currently available as a binary for your particular OS platform or version. Or, to produce a complete environment for debugging and further development, including debugging of all the C libraries Gramps uses, ... like [https://www.gtk.org/ GTK].
→Building Gramps from Scratch: hotlink brand-name dev tools
==Building Gramps from Scratch==
This is a command-line process. It's not too difficult, but you'll be using [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(macOS) Terminal.app] and, not the [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode XCode ] integrated development environment.
If you're not familiar with using the unix command line, you might find the frequent use of "~" ([https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tilde?s=t tilde]) below puzzling. It refers to the user's home directory (mine is /Users/john; if your name is John, then yours probably is too.) You can use it that way in commands if your current directory is somewhere else.
=== Step 1: Install Xcode ===
You'll need a compiler. Apple provides two ways to install one: "Command Line Tools" installs just the command-line build environment and puts most of the header files in <tt>/usr/include</tt>. Simply trying to run a program that requires it like <tt>gcc</tt> or <tt>git</tt> should produce a dialog box offering to install them, but if that doesn't work you can run <tt>sudo xcode-select --install</tt>. Apple also has a full-featured integrated development environment called Xcode. It's available for free from the App Store.
If you try to download Xcode, Apple will probably offer you the latest version of Xcode, irrespective of whether it runs on the version of Mac OS X you are using (Apple probably expects you to upgrade everything to the very latest). You may need to search for an earlier version. For example, if you're running Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan , then it is probably best to use Xcode 7 (e.g. Xcode 7.3.1). Older versions of Xcode are available from [https://developer.apple.com/downloads Apple's developer site]; you'll need to register your AppleID for development.
==== .jhbuildrc-custom ====
It's annoying and error-prone to type the long list of modules every time you want to build gramps, so you may want to modify <tt>~/.jhbuildrc-custom</tt> to declare the <tt>moduleset</tt> and <tt>modules</tt> variables. Note that <tt>.jhbuildrc-custom</tt> is a Python file that is loaded and executed by <tt>jhbuild</tt>, so you can make it quite complex. Do beware that defining new global variables will elicit a warning from <tt>jhbuild</tt> so be sure to prefix any top-level variables with '_'([https://www.dictionary.com/browse/underscore?s=t underscore]).
=== Webkit ===
Gramps has an optional dependency on [https://webkit.org/ WebKit], which is used for the <tt>html-renderer</tt> add-on. If for some reason you want to use this add-on, add <tt>WebKit</tt> to your list of dependencies but be aware that it take a long time to build.
== Bundling ==
