Monday, October 02, 2006

Compiling KDevelop from sources

Kdevelop is an IDE for KDE for various programming languages. I use it primarily for C++. It's very pleasant to use and it's also integrated with QDesigner for visually build graphical user interfaces.


Since I like to use the new features, I don't rely on the pre-built packages: I compile it from the svn sources, and in particular I'm using the currently developed 3.4 release. However, I also keep a working copy of the currently stable version 3.3.4; for this reason I install the version taken from svn in a different directory.

At first I had some problems in this process, so I report here my experience in successfully build and install kdevelop in a different directory. In particular, the following instructions assume that you want to install the compiled version in $HOME/usr/local. In case you want to install it in a different directory, all you need to change is this value.

First of all, I followed the instructions found at the web site (for downloading the sources from svn).

Then I run configure as follows (for $KDEDIR/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/kdelibs-apidocs/, please see the
instructions in the above web page):


./configure LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/local/lib:$LIBRARY_PATH --prefix=$HOME/usr/local
--with-kdelibsdoxy-dir=$KDEDIR/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/kdelibs-apidocs/
--disable-ada --disable-bash --disable-fortran --disable-haskell
--disable-java --disable-pascal --disable-perl

Of course, you can choose all the --disable options you like.

Then you can run make to compile the sources, and finally make install to install the compiled version (of course if you're installing in a system directory, then you might need to have the required privileges).

When you want to run this version of kdevelop you must use some environment variables. Here's how I run it (of course you can put this command line in a shell script):

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/local/lib:$LIBRARY_PATH
KDEDIRS=$HOME/usr/local:$KDEDIRS
$HOME/usr/local/bin/kdevelop

Now you should be able to enjoy all the nice features of kdevelop :-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I haven't tested it but it looks to me like what you describe should work fine.

However, just to point it out, this will make the SVN version of KDevelop use the same configuration files as the regular version. Offhand I can't think of any fatal problems with this but purists might mind.. ;)

You could try to play with $KDEHOME to get around this, but I'm not convinced that won't have sideeffects with sycoca.

I haven't tested it, but if anyone wants to try it, add something like "KDEHOME=$HOME/.kdevelop-svn" to that launch command.

The only guaranteed safe way I can think of is to create a second user account and use that for testing.

// teatime