How to install tidy-html5 on debian/ubuntu

[Izak Burger]

Hi all,

These instructions show an alternate way to upgrade your tidy to a
newer version. The only difference between this one, and the one that
ships with debian/ubuntu, is that this one has some html5 patches
roled in.

For those who run Precise Pangolin (12.04) I've already done the work.
Add this to your sources.list:

deb http://public.upfronthosting.co.za/debian/precise-amd64 /

Note the trailing space and slash, it's too much trouble to set up the
whole traditional pool structure. Run "apt-get update", and then
"apt-get install tidy libtidy-0.99-0". You don't need to install the
development package, python-tidy uses ctypes to hook directly into the
run time without compiling a wrapper, so no worries there.

If you're not running this version, then there is a bit more work to
do. First, you must install build-essential before you can build any
packages. Also, I prefer fakeroot (ubuntu installs it, others might
not), so:

sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot

Then clone this git repo:

git clone git://github.com/oerpub/tidy-html5.git

Change into the directory, and check your build dependencies:

dpkg-checkbuildeps

Install anything it lists using apt-get (and sudo). You should be
doing the git checkout and the building as a non-root user.

Once you have it all installed, run:

dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -rfakeroot

When this process is done, assuming there are no errors, you will have
a number of .deb files in the parent directory. These can be installed
either directly with dpkg:

dpkg -i tidy_20121113git-1_amd64.deb libtidy-0.99-0_20121113git-1_amd64.deb

... or you can use the graphical package manager, which is generally a
bit safer because it also handles dependency management (though there
should be no such issues, since you just built it on the same
machine).

Watch out for the tidy-doc package. I have reports that its
post-install script errors, but you don't need it anyway, it is no
different than the one that comes with your distro.

I hope this helps people as much as it helped Brian :-)

regards,
Izak