Building geary fails, dependency is outdated

[macdabby (Dan Behrman)]

I am a veteran coder but very new to vala and builder. I’ve been able to get some projects to run out of the box, and that’s great! but I can’t get Geary to run at all.

-- Checking for modules 'gio-2.0>=2.68;gmodule-2.0>=2.68;libxml-2.0>=2.0.0;libsoup-3.0>=3.1.1'
--   Package dependency requirement 'libsoup-3.0 >= 3.1.1' could not be satisfied.
Package 'libsoup-3.0' has version '3.1.0', required version is '>= 3.1.1'
CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake-3.22/Modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:603 (message):
  A required package was not found
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  /usr/share/cmake-3.22/Modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:825 (_pkg_check_modules_internal)
  CMakeLists.txt:346 (pkg_check_modules)

When I check what’s installed with apt, it’s libsoup-3.0 v 3.4.x. I’m when I try to build, I see that there is some script run which downloads dependencies, and maybe those are stored in another location and that is the one that is out of date?

Also, I’m sure that this is running some script behind the scenes, but I can’t tell what build command it’s actually running. It would be helpful to see that to better understand how the build process is working. I don’t see it in the build configuration either.

Where can I get some starting pointers to how this all comes together?

[wjt (Will Thompson)]

Are you building Geary on the host system, or in a container? You can check by clicking the widget in the middle of the titlebar (whose name I don’t know). On my system:

The Build Profile tells us that the org.gnome.Geary.json Flatpak manifest from within the source tree is being used; and the Runtime field confirms this, since that’s the identifier for the development branch of the GNOME runtime.

Other options include building on the host system, or in a podman or toolbox container. You can open the build preferences with Configure Project… from the dropdown menu in that same widget:

In the Overview page you can see the Current Configuration, and in the sidebar you can see the different configurations.

If you’re building against the GNOME nightly Flatpak SDK you may find that choosing Update Dependencies… helps. On my system, the current tip of Geary’s main branch builds OK.