Neither in Debian “apt install” package nor in Arch “pacman -S” gThumb packages, the “Map” extension seems to be available. The menu entry under “Preferences” → “Extensions” → “Map” does not exist. Therefore I tried to build gThumb myself with libchamplain included, which apparently is a prerequisite for the “Map” extension.
Under Debian, I was successfully able to do so, even though I had to figure out myself by reverse engineering that I have to configure usage of libchamplain with “meson configure -Dlibchamplain=true” before building it (would be nice if there was a hint in the installation instructions in the “README.md”).
However, under Arch (current kernel 6.4.12-arch1-1), I failed to get the maps extension to work. This is what I tried:
Ran meson configure -Dlibchamplain=true in “build” sub directory
Ran meson build --reconfigure in repository’s root directory
Ran ninja -C build
Ran sudo ninja -C build install
Started gThumb from command shell
Went to “Preferences” → “Extensions”: Entry for “Map” is there, but disabled
Enabled “Map” entry → after a few seconds, gThumb crashes and closes unexpectedly
On command line, got the following console output:
(gthumb:69979): libsoup-ERROR **: 13:00:21.144: libsoup2 symbols detected. Using libsoup2 and libsoup3 in the same process is not supported.
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)
Thanks a lot, with your help, I was finally able to make it work! (After some minor fights, though, such as configuring libchamplain to install to /usr/lib instead of /usr/local/lib with meson setup --prefix=/usr --buildtype=release and such).
My question 1. (and optionally 2.) still remains open, though: Is there a reason for not having the proper libchamplain and therefore the “Map” extension in the gthumb Arch and Debian packages by default?
champlain, champlain-gtk - view the place a photo was taken on a map
clutter, clutter-gtk - enhanced slideshow effects
libsoup, json-glib, webkit2gtk, libsecret - upload images to and download images from some web services such as Facebook, Flickr
brasero - write images and comments to CDs
bison, flex - web albums
That being said, the reason why libchamplain ( map support ) is disabled by default, might have to do something with the below explanation.
configure.ac ( before 2017 ):
C_ARG_ENABLE([libchamplain], [AS_HELP_STRING([--enable-libchamplain],[compile code that uses the libchamplain library (crashes frequently)])],, [enable_libchamplain=no])
which later became the following after the meson port.
meson-options.txt ( after 2017 )
option('libchamplain',
type : 'boolean',
value : false,
description : 'Use libchamplain to show the position the image refers to'
)
I’m not sure if "libchamplain" still should be disabled by default in gThumb. You can take it up with the gThumb maintainers by raising an issue at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gthumb/-/issues/
In general, when something is disabled by default in "configure.ac" / "meson-options.txt", there is usually a reason behind this, which you can always dig by doing a simple "git log" ( as I did in this case ).