Guidelines and HOWTOs/Build from source/Windows

emerge is a tool to build the KDE sources and its third-party requirements on MS Windows. It is the easy way to build KDE on MS Windows.

Setting up emerge

Setting up a compiler

Currently emerge supports both the MinGW and Microsoft Visual Studio (msvc) compiler. While MinGW is can be installed by emerge, Visual Studio must be installed independently by the user.

Direct X SDK

In order to compile the Qt5 qtbase package with MinGW, you will also need to install the Microsoft DirectX SDK, make sure to open a new command line window after the installation.

Installing Emerge

• Start a powershell environment as administrator.
• Allow execution of powershell scripts.

 Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

• Exit the administrator powershell instance.
• Start a powershell environment as a user.
• Install emerge and folow the instructions

iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KDE/emerge/master/setup/install_emerge.ps1'))

Using emerge

To use emerge you need to start a Powershell window, point that to KDEROOT\emerge and run the initalization script. For example:

C:\KDEROOT\emerge\kdeenv.ps1

This tells emerge about your environment settings (e.g. paths). It will load your configuration from KDEROOT\etc\kdesettings.ini. It should not give any error messages, otherwise emerge will not work as expected. The output should look similar to this one (of course with your paths):

PS C:\kderoot\emerge>.\kdeenv.ps1
KDEROOT     : C:\kderoot\emerge
KDECOMPILER : msvc2015
KDESVNDIR   : C:\kderoot\download\svn
KDEGITDIR   : C:\kderoot\download\git
DOWNLOADDIR : C:\kderoot\download
PYTHONPATH  : C:\kderoot\python

PS C:\kderoot\emerge>

Installing the base system

You are now ready to start building KDE, it is recommended to do so progressively, relying on emerge to automatically resolve the required dependencies at each set step:

• Enter emerge qt5. This will fetch and install Windows versions of numerous UNIX-like utilities and libraries, then checkout, compile and install Qt. This will take up to several hours.
• Enter emerge frameworks. This will checkout, compile and install the kde frameworks 5 modules.

You will now have successfully installed a base KDE system and can now install other KDE modules as required.

Every time you want to update or install a package, you should first update your emerge checkout (simply run

cd C:\kderoot\emerge
git pull

to ensure you are using the latest package recipes.

Common emerge commands

• Installing a package and its dependencies: Simply run

  emerge packagename
  

• Updating an installed package: Once you have packagename built, type

  emerge -i packagename
  

  to update packagename.