SourceForge Logo

FreeGuide Developers' Page

Patches

I (Andy Balaam) am open to contributions from anyone and I expect to accept most patches I receive, except ones that differ radically from my stated aim of creating a nice, simple TV guide.

If you're wondering what to contribute, the future plans of the developers are stored in the TODO file. The latest version of this from CVS is here.

Development Language

FreeGuide itself is written entirely in Java (1.4 required), but it uses the XMLTV tools (XMLTV is a separate project) which are written in Perl.

The releases are built using Apache's superb Ant build tool. In fact, I use the AntFarm plugin in JEdit, but this isn't necessary.

Building FreeGuide from CVS

Do a checkout with:

cvs -d:cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/freeguide-tv login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/freeguide-tv co freeguide-tv

Then download the modified XMLTV windows binary and source code packages from Sourceforge and do the following:

(Assuming you checked out the sources into ~/freeguide-tv/)

Place the source file xmltv-x.x.x-tkgui.tar.bz2 into ~/freeguide-tv/xmltv/

Unzip the Windows binary file xmltv-x.x.x-tkgui-bin-windows.zip to a temporary file and copy the file xmltv.exe to ~/freeguide-tv/xmltv/

Unzip the Linux binary file xmltv-x.x.x-tkgui-bin-linux.tar.bz2 to a temporary file and copy the file xmltv to ~/freeguide-tv/xmltv/

You should now be able to build a the source tarballs and the Windows and Linux jars using Ant like so:

cd ~/freeguide-tv
ant

To build the Linux RPM, cd into freeguide-tv/src/install/linux and modify the file buildrpm to use your own home directory instead of /home/andy. Now running that file with ./buildrpm should build the entire project and create the noarch and src RPMs in freeguide-tv/installers. The RPM spec file is in freeguide-tv/src/install/linux/freeguide-tv.spec

To build the Windows installer you need NSIS from here: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/. Install NSIS v2 and right-click on the file freeguide-tv/src/install/windows/freeguide-tv.nsi. That should build the Windows EXE installer in freeguide-tv/installers.

Help and questions

Email any questions to freeguide-tv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and we'll do our best to answer them, and put useful answers up on this page.