Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a funny kind of Unix, but it's a Unix and should be able to run Pitivi easily. It's also popular -- even lots of open source types lug around a MacBook of some kind. Think of applications as a free software gateway drug! ;)

Current status

We're working on a system to build Pitivi for Mac using GStreamer's Cerbero build system. At the moment it's alpha quality. See the list of macOS issues for details.

Besides fixing bugs, we need to also prepare a DMG to distribute Pitivi easily to Mac users.

Any help is welcome! If you are interested to help please get in touch!

Building

Clone our Cerbero repository which includes recipes/pitivi.recipe:

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/aleb/cerbero-pitivi.git

As described in the README Cerbero needs XCode and Python 3.5 or later to be able to bootstrap.

/cerbero-uninstalled bootstrap

Start the build. This takes ~1h30m on my laptop:

$ cd cerbero-pitivi
$ ./cerbero-uninstalled build pitivi

To start Pitivi, run in a terminal:

$ ./build/dist/darwin_x86_64/bin/pitivi

Particularities

Mac OS X has a few major differences from Linux:

• GTK+ uses Quartz backend instead of X11
• When building for multi-arch, a single filesystem hierarchy with “fat binaries” is used, rather than separate directories for libs/executables in each arch.
  • This causes some issues with gobject-introspection, in that attempting to support multi-arch (“Universal”) builds requires adjusting paths to the gir files. Currently this has been removed from cerbero's build scripts, so you'll only get a 64-bit build. But this might change again.
• Applications are usually “bundled” into relocatable 'Foo.app' directories which encapsulate their binaries, libraries, and shared data.

Development environment

Have a look at HACKING for some inspiration. Feel free to add some suggestions here if you find a useful workflow.