Mixxx User Manual

This repository contains the sources for the Mixxx User Manual as found at http://mixxx.org/manual/latest/.

The manual is written in reStructuredText format using the Sphinx documentation generator.

Getting Started

First Download the latest Mixxx manual source or clone the repository

$ git clone https://github.com/mixxxdj/manual.git

Next, install the dependencies using pip. From within the repository root (type cd manual after typing the above command):

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If you do not wish to use pip:

• Install Sphinx, the documentation generator.
• Install Graphviz, graph visualization software (used to draw some diagrams)

To upgrade dependencies using pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade

If you'd like to build manual PDFs, you will need a functioning LaTeX installation.

• On Mac, install MacTeX (Basic TeX).
• On Debian-based systems, install texlive-fonts-recommended and texlive-latex-extra.

Once you have the repository cloned and dependencies installed you can edit and build the manual to see your changes.

• Edit .rst files in source/
• Run make html to build an HTML version of the manual
• Open the file build/html/index.html in your Web browser to view the results

Run make linkcheck in the terminal. Sphinx will validate all internal and external links in the document, and let you know if any links are malformed, or point to dead URLs.

Guidelines for Mixxx Manual writers

The Mixxx manual is based on sound learning principles, and is supposed to be user-friendly & motivational. Please refer to the guidelines for style conventions:

• Run make html to build an HTML version of the manual, then open build/html/manual_guidelines.html in your browser (recommended).
• Alternatively, open https://github.com/mixxxdj/manual/blob/manual/source/manual_guidelines.rst for a quick overview. Github may not render all code correct.

Editing the manual using git (recommended)

• Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/mixxxdj/manual.git
• Perform changes
• Commit changes git commit -m "Insert short summary of your changes here"
• Push changes git push
• Submit a pull request

Editing the manual on Github

• Commit file edits through the GitHub web interface using the Fork and Edit button
• Submit a pull request

Internationalization (i18n)

The Mixxx manual is translated using the Transifex web service for team translation.

Prerequisites

If you did not install requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt above then you must manually install the following dependencies:

• sphinx-intl, a utility that makes it easy to translate and compile translations to Sphinx projects.
• transifex-client. Transifex allows collaborative translation via a web interface. The Python-based command line client makes it easy to fetch and push translations.

Install transifex-client on Linux and macOS

$ pip install transifex-client

Install transifex-client on Windows

The easiest way to install it is with pip:

$  easy_install pip
$  pip install transifex-client

The first line installs pip on a system level. Then it installs the Transifex Client using pip.

If you do not wish to use pip, download the latest releases from https://github.com/transifex/transifex-client/releases

You will need to make a .transifexrc in your home directory with your username and password to use the Transifex client. See transifex-configuration for more details.

Maintaining translations

These steps document how to maintain the translations of the Mixxx manual. Typically, unless you are a manual maintainer you do not need to perform these steps. However, it is appreciated if you update the source translations when making changes to the manual.

Update source translations

For every change to the manual source files (.rst) the source translation files (.pot) must be re-generated. These are stored in source/locale/pot and contain the text of every English phrase in the manual in a common format used for translation.

Additionally, for every new source file added (i.e. new chapters or manual pages) the Transifex configuration file (stored in .tx/config) needs updating.

To do both of these, run:

fab i18n_update_source_translations

Commit the new source translations and Transifex configuration with:

git add source/translations/pot .tx
git commit -m "Update source translations and Transifex configuration."

Push source translations to Transifex

After generating new source translation files and updating the Transifex configuration, you must push the new source files to Transifex to be translated.

To do this, run:

fab tx_push

Pull completed translations from Transifex

To pull newly completed translation (.po) files from Transifex, run:

fab tx_pull

Commit the changes to the repository with:

git add source/translations
git commit -m "Pull latest translations from Transifex."

Compile the translations from Transifex and verify there are no errors.

To compile the translations (.po) from Transifex into compiled translation (.mo) files, run:

fab i18n_build

We do not check .mo files into the repository, so make sure you do not add them (they are ignored by our .gitignore).

To build a translated manual in a particular language:

Note: it's good practice to clean your build directory first:

fab clean

For example, to build an HTML manual for de-DE (Germany/Germany):

fab i18n_build html:language=de-DE

Unless an error occurred, your translated HTML manual is in the build/html directory.

To build a PDF manual:

fab i18n_build pdf:language=de-DE

Your translated PDF manual is located at build/latex/Mixxx-Manual.pdf.

For more information on Translating with Sphinx, see Sphinx i18n.

Release Checklist for maintainers

• Fix and delete todos listed in build/html/todolist.html
• Fix and close issues listed in https://github.com/mixxxdj/manual/issues
• Temporarily disable the For documentation writers toctree from TOC in /index.rst
• Update the release and version tags in /conf.py
• Tag the repository with the version number, and create a new release.
• Run fab html to produce html output ready for upload to http://mixxx.org/manual/latest/
• Check the output compiles correctly and does not produce any warnings
• Add translated html output for all available languages, see i18n
• Run fab pdf to produce PDF output for distribution

Troubleshooting

Linux troubleshooting

ON some systems, using the system package version of pip and running the command pip install -r requirements.txt might damage the python installation. Concretely, pyopenssl might get damaged and you might get an error saying 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

This happens because the repository has an old version and when installing/updating the requirements, the scripts break.

The solution to fix this consists on deleting the broken files, remove the installed package and install it manually (all commands require access privileges, so use sudo or whatever you need)

Fix python:

rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL
rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pyOpenSSL-0.15.1.egg-info

Remove pip and repair python just in case:

apt-get purge python-pip
apt-get install --reinstall python

Install pip manually:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
python get-pip.py

Alternatively, instead of installing pip on the system, you can also install a python-virtualenv and then use PyPI in that virtualenv.

Windows troubleshooting

First, in order to have "pip", you need to install python. Python 2.7.12 and onwards already include pip, but you should follow the steps to upgrade it:

python -m pip install -U pip

When installing the required dependencies, you will most probably get an error which says that you need to manually install Visual studio. Concretely, you will see this:

error: Microsoft Visual C++ 9.0 is required (Unable to find vcvarsall.bat).
Get it from http://aka.ms/vcpython27

Follow that link to download an installer named VCForPython27.msi. Also, in that same link, open the "System requirements" section and download the x86 or x64 (or both) version of the Microsoft Visual C++ runtimes.

macOS troubleshooting

After installing the requirements via pip install -r requirements.txt and running make html, you might get the error

WARNING: dot command 'dot' cannot be run (needed for graphviz output), check the
graphviz_dot setting

Graphviz possibly is not installed to its default location (the path must contain an executable, not only a directory) /usr/local/bin/dot or /usr/bin/dot.

Check the path with

pip show graphviz

Uninstall

pip uninstall graphviz

install again using brew

brew install graphviz

Resources

Sphinx and RST syntax guides:

• http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html
• http://www.siafoo.net/help/reST
• http://thomas-cokelaer.info/tutorials/sphinx/rest_syntax.html

Editors with Restructured Text (reST) syntax highlighting

• Windows, Linux, macos : Atom, Visual Studio Code, Sublime
• Linux: Kate, Retext
• Windows: Intype
• Webapp: Notex

Still not enough?

Even more reStructuredText resources: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2746692/restructuredtext-tool-support