Cristiano on Tech/Life

Warning – After a quick email with Google, I advise you to not build your own Gears package. The text below is just a quick reference for me and some others that might want to build their own Gears package.

Google Gears is always a product in development. I wanted to try the latest repository build yesterday and noticed that it was relatively easy. Here is how you can do it yourself.

Step 0 – Install Xcode

If you are doing this I take it you already have Xcode installed, but in case you don’t go to the Apple site and download and install Xcode.

Step 1 – Download Source from SVN

Go into your Terminal and checkout the current Gears repository

svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gears-read-only

This can take a while as it is quite huge (640mb+). In the meanwhile proceed to step 2.

Step 2 – Download IceBerg

IceBerg is a tool for making Mac OS X installation packages (.pkg files). The Gears source comes with some commands to make a nice .pkg and I advise on using it (it makes stuff so much easier later on). Just go to the IceBerg site, download the installer and install it. 

Step 3 – Restart your Mac

Unfortunately, IceBerg needs you to restart your Mac before the Gears build-script can pick up the IceBerg tools. So wait for your SVN to check out and restart your Mac.

Step 4 – Build Gears

Open Terminal again, go into the gears-read-only/gears/ folder and type the command 

make

This will start building your code. This can take quite a while depending on your machine. On my MacBook with 4GB of RAM it took about 30 minutes. 

Step 4b – Check if the installers were build

When this process ends, read the last few lines on the terminal to make sure it build the installers. If you forgot to restart your Mac after installing IceBerg, the installers will have failed to build. In this case restart and go into the gears-read-only/gears/ folder again and type

make installers

Step 5 – Run the installer and clean up

In the end of all this you will have a gears-read-only/gears/bin-dbg/installers/Safari/ folder with a gears.pkg installer in it. Run the installer to install your Google Gears for Safari. You might need to restart your Safari afterwards to get it to load for the first time.

Don’t forget to in the end throw away all the source and bin files as it might be more than 1GB of data now.