February 2011;  Mike WB2FKO   (mph@sportscliche.com)

This xastir-cvs PKGBUILD installs the most up-to-date (often called`bleeding edge' ) version of xastir from the CVS repositories on sourceforge.net.  Arch packaging standards require that the installation be placed in /usr/share/xastir, not /usr/local/share/xastir as stated in the xastir documentation.  There will also be a .xastir folder in the home directory.

Sound
======
To enable the speech feature, you must have the festival package installed (you will also need a speaker package such as festival-en or festival-english) before building xastir.   Festival must be running before xastir is started for speech to function properly.  I was able to start it on the command line with

$festival --server

or you can write a simple script to automate the sequential starting process.  There may be problems if other programs such as a media player are accessing sound simultaneously.  The PKGBUILD automatically downloads an 850 kB bundle of .wav files located at:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/xastir/xastir-sounds.tgz

and places them here:

/usr/share/xastir/sounds/

These are audio alarm recordings of a North American English speaker dating from 2003.  The audio play command `play' in the configure menu may not work; try `aplay' instead. 

Patching xastir 2.0.0 for the ABS
===========================
As of October 2010, the most current `stable' release was xastir 2.0.0.  This was an important release because the developers migrated from defunct Tiger Maps to Open Street Maps (OSM).  xastir-2.0.0 can be built from source using the usual process of 

./configure
make
sudo make install

It is not, however, compatible with the Arch Build System (ABS) unless the makefile is patched.  A patch is needed to fix errors in the destination directories.  Tom Russo provided a patch to accomplish this:

-- Makefile.am	8 Sep 2010 18:13:26 -0000	1.57
+++ Makefile.am	9 Nov 2010 01:48:13 -0000	1.58
@@ -72,10 +72,10 @@
 # documentation is FHS compliant.
 
 install-exec-hook:
-	-rm -rf ${pkgdatadir}/doc
+	-rm -rf $(DESTDIR)${pkgdatadir}/doc
 
 install-data-hook:
-	cd $(mapdir) && \
+	cd $(DESTDIR)$(mapdir) && \
 	rm -f CC_OpenStreetMap.png && \
 	$(LN_S) CC_OpenStreetMap_logo.png CC_OpenStreetMap.png

To use the patch, create an empty file (named fixdestdir.patch here), paste in the above text, and place it somewhere in your home directory.  The patch is called with a line that is added to a standard PKGBUILD at the top of the build command:

patch < $path-to-patch-file/fixdestdir.patch

Note that this patch is NOT necessary if xastir is built from CVS.  The developers fixed the problem in a subsequent CVS release.