Building from Source
Table of contents
Building ROOT from source is no easy task - just ask anyone who has done it!
Fortunately, the quality of the documentation has improved dramatically over the years, which has to some extent mitigated the difficulty of the task.
Dependencies
ROOT provides list of dependence for different operating systems, which can be found here.
In my experience, these are not reliably up-to-date, but still a good starting point for wrangling all the build pieces.
Build instructions
The official build instructions can be found here.
Really, the build instructions are better passed to a script that can be easily edited and executed - there are simply too many options to type out for each build!
Assuming a directory structure similar to the following:
.
├── build
│ └── root
├── build-root.sh
└── rootwhere root/ is the ROOT git repository, build/root/ is the ROOT build directory, and build-root.sh is the build script, I automate compiling the ROOT source code by running
bash build-root.shwhich you can download here: build-root.sh
It’s still a work in progress, but it gets the job done.
Unfortunately, having a build script isn’t a bulletproof solution either, as the build options tend to change (often silently) between versions. However, this problem may be diminished in the near future (see e.g., https://github.com/root-project/web/issues/272).