ClearSilver

​Clearsilver is a powerful and flexible HTML templating engine.

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Clearsilver has its drawbacks, and after a few years of successful but sometimes frustrating use, the TracTeam unanimously—and enthusiastically--decided to switch to another templating engine: ​Genshi. Starting with 0.11, Trac will no longer require Clearsilver. However, through 0.12 Trac will retain the infrastructure needed to support plugins using Clearsilver.

Plugin developers should nonetheless consider switching to Genshi during the transition phase of 0.11 development. See TracDev/ApiChanges/0.11.

Trac 0.12 still contains the Clearsilver supporting code, although the code is no longer supported.

Starting with r10405 (Trac 1.0dev), that code has been removed, making the transition to Genshi templates mandatory.

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Download

Official ​Clearsilver downloads.

For Python 2.5, you need to build the package yourself, and you probably need the following patch: ​googlegroups:trac-users:5b502b38f4e13c8f

Furthermore, for Python 2.5 on Win32 there is an egg build and instructions at ​http://tn123.ath.cx/clearsilver/.

Building the package yourself

If you have to build the package yourself, be sure to build a thread-safe version of the library. There's no explicit configuration switch for that. Just pay attention to the Checking pthread.h… yes line during configuration. If it's no, then you'll have to fix the configuration step yourself, see that comment.

Non thread-safe builds have been reported to not work with Trac in a multi-threaded setup, see the comment linked above.

On x86_64 platforms, the 0.10.x series is needed. For ​gcc4, Trac release 0.10+ should be used.

ClearSilver 0.10.2

There's a typo in the configure scripts. You'll need to apply the following patch first:

configure

@@ -6045 +6045 @@
     PYTHON=$python_bin
     PYTHON_INC="-I$python_inc"
     PYTHON_LIB=$python_lib
-    if test ! $?PYTHON_SITE; then
+    if test ! $PYTHON_SITE; then
        PYTHON_SITE=$python_site
     fi
     BUILD_WRAPPERS="$BUILD_WRAPPERS python"

configure.in

@@ -288 +288 @@
     PYTHON=$python_bin
     PYTHON_INC="-I$python_inc"
     PYTHON_LIB=$python_lib
-    if test ! $?PYTHON_SITE; then
+    if test ! $PYTHON_SITE; then
        PYTHON_SITE=$python_site
     fi
     BUILD_WRAPPERS="$BUILD_WRAPPERS python"

Then you can call configure, for example like this:

./configure --prefix=/opt/clearsilver-0.10.2 \
  --with-python=/opt/python-2.4.2/bin/python \
  --disable-ruby --disable-java --disable-perl --disable-apache --disable-csharp

At this point make && make install should work. Caution: 'should' is relative.

Note for *BSD: you may have to use GNUmake by using gmake because make may not work.

Note for x86_64 Linux: ClearSilver is known not to compile on RHEL 4.x x86_64. The ClearSilver developers have not responded except to occasionally nuke threads on their mailing list about the topic. Consider using Trac 0.11-devel instead. (This might no longer be true for clearsilver 0.10.5, I've compiled & installed without issue on x86_64)

Useful thread here on Python2.5 and Clearsilver10.3, which covers compiling and configuring on x86_64: ​https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/clearsilver/+bug/86685