[Ardour-Dev] Building Ardour 5.9 from git: No complaints!

[Stephan Neuhaus]

Dear list,

I have recently compiled Ardour 5.9 from github source: cloned the repo, 
switched to tag 5.9; I chose 5.9 because that's advertised on the Ardour 
download page as "stable". When I read that the developers wouldn't give 
any support for compiling Ardour yourself, I thought "uh-oh". But I 
needn't have worried, it was a much more pleasant experience than I 
feared. Basically, I had to install the necessary libraries, set the 
environment variable for the directory containing .pc files, and that 
was it! (However, see [1].)

I also, with some trepidation, connected a Faderport8. Not only was it 
detected correctly, but once I follwed the steps in the Ardour manual, 
it worked perfectly right then and there.

Ardour starts, loads and saves sessions, records and plays back 
absolutely fine, as far as I can see.

For a program of Ardour's complexity, all this is not something I 
expected. (Try compiling Firefox or Chrome, for example, to see what I 
mean.) Huge kudos to the development team!

I thought that some good news on a list that's probably usually filled 
with things that do NOT work would be welcome :)

Cheers,

Stephan

[1] I tried compiling with clang, since I saw in waf that this was one 
of the options, but that gave errors[2]. I'm guessing that clang is 
being worked on? If that's not the case and if compiling with clang 
should work, I'm happy to assist.

[2] And scary errors too, such as a memory alignment warnings/error, 
where, if I remember correctly, a char* (alignment 1 byte) would be cast 
to a struct something* (alignment 8 bytes). If that char* came form 
malloc(3), that is OK, since malloc guarantees correct alignment for 
anything, but when compiling with -Werror, clang will stop.