K3b/Getting Started

Getting Started in K3b Development

Setting Up Environment

Create target install directory. For the sake of example we will assume your home directory is /home/joe and you will install your compiled K3b to /home/joe/k3b/install. Add following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:

export K3B_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/joe/k3b/install
export KDEDIRS=${K3B_INSTALL_PREFIX}:${KDEDIRS}
export PATH=${K3B_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin:${PATH}
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=${K3B_INSTALL_PREFIX}/share:${XDG_DATA_DIRS}

Relogin to let changes take effect.

Getting Source Code

K3b sources code is hosted in KDE git repository. It is a part of KDE Extragear module

If you don't have a KDE development access you can get the source code using anonymous access repository:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/k3b

If you have development access you should go the other way:

git clone ssh://[email protected]:k3b

This will give you right to push back your changes to the origin repository.

Compilation

K3b, as most KDE applications, uses CMake for configuration and compilation of source code.

First the build directory should be created.

cd k3b
mkdir build
cd build

It is guaranteed all files created during build will be placed in this directory. That means that if you want to clean up source tree after build the only thing you need to do is to remove build directory.

Now we need to configure the source tree. This have to be done only once, later this step will be invoked automatically when necessary. If you are familiar with Autotools this step corresponds to ./configure command.

cmake .. \
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/joe/k3b/install \
      -DKDE4_AUTH_POLICY_FILES_INSTALL_DIR=/home/joe/k3b/install/share/polkit-1/actions \
      -DK3B_DEBUG=ON \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

CMake will search for all required and optional libraries.

Finally to compile the source code and install it you should call:

make && make install

After that compiled K3b will be placed in /home/joe/k3b/install directory. Now you can run K3b by simply typing in the console:

k3b

See Also

• K3b community wiki – for roadmap and other organizational information