Release 3.6.11

[pedrolcl]

Changes for v3.6.11:

• New cmake option: BUILD_TESTING to control building the unit tests.
• Windows compatibility: open also stdout in binary mode.
• Generated "eas.h" header, with version numbers from the cmake project version.
• Fixed ticket Remove prebuilt binaries and non-distributable files #2: Removed prebuilt binaries and non-distributable files.

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This discussion was created from the release Release 3.6.11.

[pedrolcl]

Advice to Linux packagers about running the unit tests

I've received some reports from people that is packaging sonivox, but the GTest executable is not able to load the dynamic library in the packaging environment. This is because the cmake configuration command has -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH:BOOL=ON like this:

/usr/bin/cmake ... -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH:BOOL=ON -DBUILD_TESTING=ON ...

By default, CMake adds a RPATH header in every binary (shared library or executable). This allows the programs to be run from the build directory directly, finding libraries from the same build directory not yet installed on the system. This is what is needed by the GTest executable, which is run twice:

• First, at build time for discovering the available tests.
• Later when executing ctest or the command cmake --build <build dir> --target test.

There is no problem with using RPATH in the build directory binaries, because the RPATH headers will be removed by cmake at install time. There will be no binaries installed on the system with RPATH headers.

When RPATH is disabled at configuration, the output of the first run is something like this:

/usr/bin/cmake -D TEST_TARGET=SonivoxTest ... -P /usr/share/cmake/Modules/GoogleTestAddTests.cmake
/home/user/rpm/BUILD/sonivox-3.6.11/build/SonivoxTest: error while loading shared libraries: libsonivox.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake/Modules/GoogleTestAddTests.cmake:77 (message):
  Error running test executable.

    Path: '/home/user/rpm/BUILD/sonivox-3.6.11/build/SonivoxTest'
    Result: 127
    Output:

Call Stack (most recent call first):
  /usr/share/cmake/Modules/GoogleTestAddTests.cmake:173 (gtest_discover_tests_impl)

make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/build.make:104: SonivoxTest] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:90: CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:149: all] Error 2

To solve this problem, you need to call the cmake configuration with -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH:BOOL=OFF or you will need to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH with the build directory path before building.

Fedora packaging documentation has a good advice about this issue.

See also this cmake wiki article.

[pedrolcl]

Installing documentation

The source tree has a docs/ directory with many files and subdirectories. Packagers probably want to package documentation in the sonivox -development package. Here is some advice...

• Files with the JET_ prefix should not be packaged, because the Jet interface is excluded from the library and headers.
• There are .ODT (OpenOffice) and .PDF files with the same content. It would be a waste of disk space packaging both file types, but it is up to you which ones to package.

[pedrolcl]

The sonivoxrender test program

The source code of this program is in the source tree, directory example/ and it is not built at the same time as the libraries and unit tests. This is deliberate. It may be built by a developer later as an exercise, or used as inspiration or illustration of the library capabilities. This program is crude and primitive, please don't expose your users to it.

If you want something using sonivox that may be useful for your users, and that sucks a bit less, please consider the programs already cited on the readme document:

• Linux-SonivoxEas with ALSA Sequencer MIDI input and Pulseaudio output.
• multiplatform-sonivoxeas with Drumstick::RT MIDI input and Qt Multimedia audio output. Beware that Qt6 audio output in Linux may be buggy.

Both programs not only play MIDI files, but are also real-time synthesizers. And, of course, please package drumstick with sonivox support. It will be available in drumstick-vpiano, VMPK and dmidiplayer and your users/I will love you too.