Building or installing

I provide packages for a number of distros. If possible, please use these instead of building from source. Contributions on this front are welcome.

Installing from packages

Debian-based

As of today (2022-02-27), mrcal is included in the bleeding-edge versions of Debian and Ubuntu. So if you're running at least Debian/testing or the not-yet-published Debian 12 (bookworm) or Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy), you can simply 

apt install mrcal libmrcal-dev

to install (for instance) the commandline tools and the C development library respectively.

For older distros I currently distribute packages for

  • Debian/sid (this will be removed soon since mrcal is now in the main Debian archives)
  • Debian/buster
  • Debian/bullseye
  • Ubuntu/focal (20.04 LTS)
  • Ubuntu/bionic (18.04 LTS)

To use these, add to your /etc/apt/sources.list: 

deb [trusted=yes] http://mrcal.secretsauce.net/packages/DISTRO/public/ DISTRO main

where DISTRO is one of

  • sid
  • buster
  • bulleye
  • focal
  • bionic

Then, apt update && apt install mrcal libmrcal-dev. The mrcal package pulls in the commandline tools and, indirectly, the python libraries. The libmrcal-dev is the C dev stuff; not needed if you're not building C code that uses mrcal. The chessboard corner finder, while not strictly required, is needed if you're doing chessboard-based calibrations. apt install mrgingham

Building from source

If you cannot use the packages for whatever reason, you must build from source. This isn't difficult, but requires you to obtain all the dependencies. They're listed in the Build-Depends section of the sample package definition. Most of these are available in most distros. Things that may not be:

  • libdogleg-dev: the optimization library. Sources live here. You need at least version 0.15.3.
  • vnlog: the toolkit to manipulate textual tables. Sources live here. You only need this for the test suite. There's nothing to build. Simply downloading the sources and pointing the PATH there is sufficient.
  • python3-numpysane: The make-numpy-reasonable library from here. You absolutely need at least version 0.35. Available in the usual places Python libraries live. This is a python-only library. Simply downloading the sources and pointing the PYTHONPATH there is sufficient.
  • python3-gnuplotlib: The plotting library from here. You need at least version 0.38. Available in the usual places Python libraries live. This is a python-only library. Simply downloading the sources and pointing the PYTHONPATH there is sufficient.
  • mrgingham: the chessboard corner finder. This isn't strictly a requirement - any corner finder can be used. If you want to use this one (and you can't use the packages), you need to build it. Sources live here.
  • re2c: parser-generator for the C code to parse .cameramodel files. At least version 2 is required.

Once these are all downloaded, libdogleg and re2c built and the PATH and PYTHONPATH set, we can build mrcal. The child processes need access to the PATH and PYTHONPATH, so 

export PATH
export PYTHONPATH

If you "installed" libdogleg somehow, then you're ready, so just make. Otherwise, tell the build about where the built libdogleg is: 

LIBDOGLEGDIR=....
CFLAGS=-I$LIBDOGLEGDIR LDFLAGS="-L$LIBDOGLEGDIR -Wl,-rpath=$LIBDOGLEGDIR"  make

If that works, the test suite should all pass: 

make test-nosampling

If stuff doesn't work, feel free to bug me. But you really should be using the packages, if at all possible