Patches for Drivel

This page contains links to and instructions for applying the patches I made for the Drivel Blog Editor. I use LiveJournal a lot (I have a permanent account), and since I switched to Ubuntu I have used Drivel to create and edit entries for my LJ blog.

I like Drivel because it is a rather full-featured client, which also provides notifications in the menu bar when your friends page is updated -- an important feature for me. However, there are two very important drawbacks to Drivel: it does not have support for entry-tags, and it seems to be a dead project since 2003.

Thanks to the concept of open source, I was able to modify Drivel to my own wishes. In my particular case, that meant adding support for tags.

Applying a patch

I use Ubuntu, so the instructions you find here are geared towards users of that distribution. You may have to modify the various commands to your distribution.
Applying a patch takes only a few steps:

1. Make sure you have all the build-dependencies;
2. Get the source for Drivel
3. Download and apply the patch
4. Compile Drivel
5. Install your patched version of Drivel
6. Enjoy having tag support!

Getting the build-dependencies

Drivel needs quite a bit of tools and libraries installed to compile. Luckily, the package manager knows which packages are needed to build Drivel. Open a terminal and issue the following command to automatically download and install all needed packages:
sudo apt-get build-dep drivel
If you haven't done any development work before, this might take a while!

Getting the source for Drivel

The source for Drivel is also available from the Ubuntu repositories. Open a terminal, and issue the following command to download the Drivel source:
sudo apt-get source drivel
This will download the source and the Ubuntu-specific patches, and deploy the source in a directory called drivel-2.0.3.

All files in the source tree are owned by root. You will need to make them your own. Issue the following command to do this:
cd drivel-2.0.3 ; sudo chown -R `whoami` .

Apply the patch

You can download the patch (which is in essence a text file) here. Save it somewhere convenient (such as your drivel-2.0.3-directory. To apply the patch, issue the command:
patch -p2 -i drivel.ljtags.0_2.patch
You will see a list of source files that have been modified.

Compiling Drivel

From the drivel-2.0.3 directory, issue the following command to configure and build your patched version of Drivel:
./configure && make
Compiling it all will take some time!

Installing your patched version

If you have Drivel already installed, you will have to remove it before installing the patched version. Issue the following command:
sudo apt-get remove drivel
to remove the standard version of Drivel from your machine. Then, issue the following command to install the patched version:
sudo make install
This will install the newly compiled Drivel executable in the correct place, along with all the Drivel images.

Use your patched version

After that, you can use Drivel as usual. Except from now on, you will have support for tags when using Drivel to compose or edit entries for LiveJournal!

Changelog