Building

Windows

Software

Download and install (in their default install paths):

• Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop + Visual Studio 2012 Update 3
• Inno Setup 5.5 Unicode
• 7-Zip x64
• gendef (extract to c:\mozilla-build)
• msgfmt (extract to c:\mozilla-build)

Source code

Download the HexChat source code and extract it to somewhere. You will work in the extracted hexchat folder from now.

GTK+

Create a folder for GTK+, referred to as YourDepsPath from now (C:\mozilla-build\hexchat\gtk by default). Specify the absolute path to YourDepsPath in win32\hexchat.props with the YourDepsPath property. Download:

• GTK+ x86 bundle
• GTK+ x64 bundle

Extract them to win32 and x64 in YourDepsPath.

See also

If you would like to build GTK+ yourself, read this guide.

Language interfaces

You can skip this step, but then you won’t be able to generate the installer. Download:

• Perl 5.18 x86 (extract to c:\mozilla-build\perl-5.18\Win32)
• Python 2.7 x86 (install to c:\mozilla-build\python-2.7\Win32)
• Python 3.3 x86 (install to c:\mozilla-build\python-3.3\Win32)
• Perl 5.18 x64 (extract to c:\mozilla-build\perl-5.18\x64)
• Python 2.7 x64 (install to c:\mozilla-build\python-2.7\x64)
• Python 3.3 x64 (install to c:\mozilla-build\python-3.3\x64)

You can use other paths, but then you must update the related properties in win32\hexchat.props accordingly.

Building

Open win32\hexchat.sln, right click on the release/installer (or release/copy if you skipped the language interfaces) project and set it as the startup project. Now you can compile from under the Build menu to your taste.

If everything went fine, the resulting binaries will be found in hexchat-build\Win32 and/or hexchat-build\x64. It was easy, wasn’t it?

Unix

First of all, you have to install the build dependencies just like you would for an XChat compilation. Package names differ across distros, so be creative and check your configure output if you get an error. Also most package-managers can get the dependencies for you:

• yum: yum-builddep hexchat
• apt: apt-get build-dep xchat (and these... libnotify-dev libproxy-dev libpci-dev libcanberra-dev)

HexChat has its source code hosted using Git, so you have to install Git as well. When it’s ready, you can start the actual compilation, which is basically:

git clone https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat.git
cd hexchat
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

This will compile with defaults. See ./configure –help for more info about flags.

Building Theme Manager

The theme manager isn’t built by default on Unix. To do so install MonoDevelop with your package manager of choice then run this:

cd hexchat/src/htm
mdtool --verbose build htm-mono.csproj
mono thememan.exe

Mac

Install Homebrew, then install all the build dependencies of HexChat such as GTK+. Be creative and check your configure output if you get an error.

Download the testing package which is prepared for Homebrew compilation (basically a clone of Git HEAD with ./autogen.sh ran on Debian 6). Extract it and run the following commands:

cd hexchat
./configure --disable-nls --disable-xlib --disable-perl
make
./src/fe-gtk/hexchat

See ./configure –help for more info about flags.