Bug 518771

First, thank you very much for taking the time to read this issue. DigiKam is an excellent application, and I sincerely appreciate the work that has gone into it.

I am currently trying to use the latest DigiKam on one of my embedded ARM64 systems (Orange Pi, Ubuntu 22.04). However, I noticed that the version available via apt is quite outdated.

To work around this, I tried building DigiKam from source. During that process, I encountered several build-related issues. From the perspective of someone who would like to contribute to the project, I found the current build workflow rather difficult to navigate. I would like to share some of the issues I ran into, and I would also be happy to help improve the situation if possible.

Issues and points of confusion
Lack of official ARM64 Linux support
I could not find any official installation packages or clear build instructions specifically for ARM64 Linux.

Dependency handling is complex across platforms
For example, on Linux, after using https://github.com/cgilles/digikam-install-deps.git to install dependencies, packaging the result as an AppImage becomes problematic because some dependency paths need to point to /opt/qt6/*.

In addition, Qt6 on ARM64 has specific OS requirements. According to the Qt documentation
(https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/linux.html), ARM64 is only supported on certain Linux distributions:

Ubuntu 24.04 (GCC 13.x)
Debian 11.6 (GCC 10)
Debian 12 (GCC 12)
However, this requirement does not appear to be checked in https://github.com/cgilles/digikam-install-deps.git.

Documentation issue in the official Linux build instructions
On the following page:
https://www.digikam.org/download/git/

In the Linux section for Qt6, the instructions currently say:

bash
./bootstrap.linux
cd build
make -j4
However, cd build appears to be incorrect; it should be:

bash
cd build.qt6
Build scripts are distributed across multiple locations
In addition to the build-related scripts under ./bootstrap.xxx, there are also scripts under digikam/project/bundles. For new contributors, this makes it difficult to understand which build path should be followed.

Suggestion
I would like to suggest considering a more unified build toolchain, similar to Chromium’s approach. For example, using a single dependency-fetching tool such as depot_tools could simplify dependency management across platforms and avoid the need for different installation methods in different environments.

It would also be helpful to have a build system that clearly separates outputs for different platforms, similar to:

gn gen out/android_debug
gn gen out/ios_debug
I hope these points are useful. If there is interest in improving the build system, I would be very happy to help in any way I can.

Thank you again for your time and for your work on DigiKam.