How I build jbig2enc from source

Posted on Monday 25 May 2026 .

This post was inspired by a recording of Andrew Kelley speaking at GOTO 2023. Andrew is the creator of the Zig programming language. The inspiration I found in his talk has nothing to do with Zig.

His talk focuses on ‘How to Build Software From Source’. I've built software from source in the past. My first memory of Linux was installing Slackware from floppy disks in the late 1990s. My second memory is working through Linux from Scratch. Later in the 2000s and 2010s I used Gentoo Linux. That's a lot of building software from source.

More recently I've spent time packaging software. Both proprietary and open source software. I've been a release manager, implemented continuous integration, adopted reproducible builds. I've learnt a lot about Python packaging and enough about building C and C++ extensions. I've created packages for Linux distributions; mostly Gentoo, Alpine and some Fedora. I spent a lot of time on the steps that come between building and using software.

This talk inspired me to think differently. To consider building the software and then using the software almost immediately. The step or steps in between don't need to be complicated. In the example in this post the only step in between is to copy the executable onto PATH. Different contexts require different levels of sophistication.

The rest of this post is a set of instructions for building version 0.32 of jbig2enc. These steps are loosely based on the relevant Alpine Linux APKBUILD. The posts uses an Incus container so that the steps are repeatable.

First start with a configuration file — config.yaml — that tells CloudInit how to configure that container. The vendor data YAML inside the CloudInit YAML specifies the build time dependencies.

description: Incus profile for building jbig2enc using images:fedora/43/cloud
config:
  user.vendor-data: |
    #cloud-config
    package_update: true
    package_upgrade: true
    packages: [git, automake, libtool, leptonica-devel, gcc-c++]

Command to start a suitable container:

incus launch images:fedora/43/cloud c1 < config.yaml \
&& incus exec c1 -- cloud-init status --wait

Commands to clone the repository and build the jbig2enc software inside the container:

incus exec c1 -- su - fedora --command "git config set --global advice.detachedHead false \
    && git clone --revision 0.32 https://github.com/agl/jbig2enc.git \
    && cd jbig2enc \
    && ./autogen.sh \
    && ./configure --prefix=/home/fedora/.local \
    && make \
    && make install"

That command, above, results in two executables in ~/.local/bin:

the compiled jbig2 executable and
a Python script jbig2topdf.py.

Reviewing build output

warning: refs/tags/0.32 23e5e92f11cfcf28f0a519b1cf85fc0f3bee3b51 is not a commit!

It is safe to ignore the above warning because 0.32 is an annotated tag. Ordinarily I would use 0.32^{} to peel the reference but neither --branch or --revision accept that argument.

  /bin/sh ../libtool   --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c jbig2 '/home/fedora/.local/bin'
…
/usr/bin/install -c jbig2topdf.py '/home/fedora/.local/bin'

The above two lines output by the make install command show the build copying the two files required files into ~/.local/bin.

Commands to install the two binaries on the local system:

incus file pull c1/home/fedora/.local/bin/jbig2 ~/.local/bin \
&& incus file pull c1/home/fedora/.local/bin/jbig2topdf.py ~/.local/bin \
&& hash -r

To check that the compiled executable is portable to this system; check for "not found" in the output of ldd ~/.local/bin/jbig2.

Updated 2025-06-22: update to release 0.32.