Introduction
Liferea is a desktop feed reader/news aggregator that brings together all of the content from your favorite subscriptions into a simple interface that makes it easy to organize and browse feeds. Its GUI is similar to a desktop mail/news client, with an embedded web browser.
Installation from Package
For distro specific package installation check out https://lzone.de/liferea/install.htm
Building Liferea Yourself
This section describes how to compile Liferea yourself. If you have any problems compiling the source file an issue at Github and we will help you asap.
Mandatory Dependencies
libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libsqlite3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libjson-glib-dev libgirepository1.0-dev libpeas-dev libfribidi-dev gsettings-desktop-schemas-dev python3 libtool intltool
Compiling from Tarball
Download a tarball from https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea/releases and extract and compile with
tar jxvf liferea-1.13.3.tar.bz2
./configure
make
sudo make install
Compiling from Git
Check out the code:
git clone https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea.git
Then build it with:
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install
If you compile with a --prefix directory which does not match $XDG_DATA_DIRS you will get a runtime error about the schema not being found. To workaround set $XDG_DATA_DIRS before starting Liferea. For example:
my_dir=$HOME/tmp/liferea
./autogen.sh --prefix=$my_dir
make
sudo make install
env XDG_DATA_DIRS="$my_dir/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS" $my_dir/bin/liferea
Contributing
As the project is hosted at Github pull requests and tickets via Github are the best way to contribute to Liferea.
Translating
Before starting to translate you need a translation editor. We suggest
to use poedit or gtranslator. Please edit the translation using such a
translation editor and create a Github pull request for the new .po file.
New Translations
To create a new translation you must load the translation template, which you
can find in the release tarball as po/liferea.pot, into your translation
editor. After editing it save it under a new name (usually your locales name
with the extension .po).
Updating Translations
When updating an existing translation please ensure to respect earlier translators work. If the latest translation is only a few months old please contact the latest translator first asking him to review your changes especially if you change already translated literals.
Localizing Feed Lists
When Liferea starts for the first time it installs a localized feed list if available. If this is not the case for your locale you might want to provide one. To check if there is one for your country have a look into the "opml" subdirectory in the latest release tarball or GIT.
If you want to provide/update a localized feed list please follow these rules:
- Keep the English part of the default feed list
- Only add neutral content feeds (no sex, no ideologic politics, no illegal stuff)
- Provide good and short feed titles
- Provide HTML URLs for each feed.
Creating Plugins
Liferea supports GObject Introspection based plugins using libpeas. The Liferea distribution comes with a set of Python plugin e.g. the media player, libsecret support, a tray icon plugin and maybe others.
Why We Use Plugins?
The idea behind plugins is to extend Liferea without changing compile time requirements. With the plugin only activating if all its bindings are available Liferea uses plugins to automatically enable features where possible.
How Plugins Interact With Liferea
You can develop plugins for your private use or contribute them upstream. In any case it makes sense to start by cloning one of the existing plugins and to think about how to hook into Liferea. There are two common ways:
- using interfaces,
- or by listening to events on Liferea objects,
- or not at all by just controlling Liferea from the outside.
The media player is an example for 1.) while the tray icon is an example for 3.) If you find you need a new plugin interface (called Activatables) in the code feel free to contact us on the mailing list. In general such a tight coupling should be avoided.
About the exposed GIR API: At the moment there is no stable API. Its just some header files fed into g-ir-scanner. Despite this method names of the core functionality in Liferea has proven to be stable during release branches. And if you contribute your plugin upstream it will be updated to match renamed functionality.
Testing Plugins
To test your new plugin you can use ~/.local/share/liferea/plugins. Create the directory and put the plugin script and the .plugin file there and restart Liferea.
Watch out for initialization exceptions on the command line as they will permanently disable the plugin. Each time this happens you need to reenable the plugin from within the plugin tab in the preferences dialog!
How to Help With Testing
Bug Reports
If you want to help with testing grab the latest tarball or follow GIT master and write bug reports for any functional problem you experience. If you have time help with bug triaging. Check if you see any of the open bugs that are not yet confirmed.
Debugging Crashes
In case of crashes create gdb backtraces and post them in the bug tracker. To create a backtrace start Liferea using "gdb liferea". At the gdb prompt type "run" to start the execution and "bt" after the crash. Send us the "bt" output!
Note: Often people confuses assertions with crashes. Assertions do halt the program because of a totally unexpected situation. Creating a backtrace in this situation will only point to the assertion line, which doesn't help much. In case of an assertion simply post a bug report with the assertion message.
Debugging Memory Leaks
If you see memory leakage please take the time to do a run
valgrind --leak-check=full liferea
to identify leaks and send in the output.
How to Get Support
When using distribution packages
Do not post bug reports in the Liferea bug tracker, use the bug reporting system of your distribution instead. We (upstream) cannot fix distribution packages!
Before raising an issue
Install the latest stable release and check if the problem is solved already. Please do not ask for help for older releases!
Issue Tracker
Once you verified the latest stable release still has the problem please raise an issue in the GitHub bug tracker (https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea/issues).