Guidelines and HOWTOs/Build from source: Difference between revisions
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== Compilation: how to quickly solve build problems == | == Compilation: how to quickly solve build problems == | ||
See [[Get Involved/development#How to solve build problems]] | See [[Get Involved/development#How to solve build problems]] | ||
= Alternative building methods = | = Alternative building methods = |
Revision as of 20:41, 25 July 2020
Build KDE Frameworks and Applications
Design features
Qt and most KDE software are written in C++ whereas its "competitor" GTK is written in C making it very portable and easy to produce language bindings for (for Ruby, Python, Bash etc.). So it is possible to write a complete GTK GUI app in Bash script, but so far that has not been done for Qt.
Safety Precautions
Configuring your build environment is the single most important step in building KDE software. Luckily, KDE Frameworks development libraries are packaged by most major distributions. In general, building and installing user space programs such as Calligra can be done safely without altering any system files. Whenever possible, it is recommended that you build KDE using your normal user account. Unless you are interested in changing the behavior of your system, you should build with a normal account. Even if you are a a KWin or Plasma developer wishing to test a full Plasma session with compositing effects, there are ways to construct the desired testing bed entirely within your normal user account, e.g. running Plasma through a nested X server using xypher.
However, to permanently alter your Plasma desktop environment through new System Configuration Modules and the like, you will often need to install shared libraries and other files in system folders. In these cases, bad installation can render your system unstable or your desktop environment unusable. Always take caution before executing any commands as root! A sudo make install
can not always be undone by a simple sudo make uninstall
. Technologies like containerization may help solve these problems in the future, but current distribution systems have no way to monitor the alterations you make to system shared libraries as the system administrator. Another option is to use snapshots of a BTRfs formatted system harddisk and use snapper-GUI to roll back in case of an error. Always keep records of what you are doing and make sure you know how to access the install logs to give yourself a better chance of reverting files by hand if necessary. And of course, please keep high quality, frequent backups of your data.
Configuration scripts
A set of configuration scripts and bash commands are provided as a recommended configuration when building KDE software manually. If you use these as provided then your build will be a lot easier and it will be easier for you to find support online. The one disadvantage to these scripts is that they hide important details from you which you may want to learn about. However the scripted and by-hand methods are completely interchangeable so once you are comfortable building KDE using the scripts you can learn more by doing everything yourself.
If you want to do the work by hand you can follow the detailed instructions else continue here on.
Install required devel packages
This section provides information about required and optional software packages needed to build the KDE applications.
Qt5 is the base of KDE software. Your distro provides suitable devel packages containing prominently the Qt C++ header files below /usr/include/****.h . Optionally, you can build your own Qt5.
Follow this page to install the required dependencies.
Git remote prefix
See Get Involved/development#Configure Git
kdesrc-build
See Get Involved/development#Set up kdesrc-build
Testing
Running unit tests
Unit tests are ran from the build dir of each framework; you should first cd
into it.
You need a separate DBus session because the dbus server needs to have the right value of XDG_DATA_DIRS, in order to find $KF5/share/dbus-1/services for starting services (e.g. kded5).
$ eval `dbus-launch`
$ kdeinit5
$ make test
Note: Regular apps will start kdeinit5 automatically. The reason it has to be started by hand when running unit tests is some strange interaction with ctest.
Warning: never start a KDE 4 application in this separate DBus session. It would conflict with your running Plasma 4 desktop.
Note: KDE_FULL_SESSION=true is needed to make sure that the correct QPA will be loaded.
Many of the tests require an X server, and will pop up windows briefly. An easy way to allow these tests to run without interfering with your normal X session is to do
$ xvfb-run -s '-screen 0 1024x768x24' make test
The -s argument tells Xvfb to set the first screen to be 1024x768 pixels, with a depth of 24; at least one test requires a depth greater than 8. In this case, if you also ensure DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is not set, the tests should not find your existing DBus session, and instead launch a new DBus instance.
Note that the KWindowSystem tests require a NETWM-compatible window manager to be running. One way to do this is to create a script to run such a window manager, followed by whatever is passed to it. For example, if you have the window manager awesome installed, you could create a script called awesome-run as follows:
#!/bin/sh
awesome &
exec "$@"
and then run the tests as
$ xvfb-run -s '-screen 0 1024x768x24' /path/to/awesome-run make test
If you want to publish your test results, instead of "make test" run
$ make Experimental
The test results will appear on http://my.cdash.org/index.php?project=<projectname>
Testing Plasma
See Get Involved/development#Plasma
Troubleshooting
Compilation: how to quickly solve build problems
See Get Involved/development#How to solve build problems
Alternative building methods
Kubuntu CI
Kubuntu CI (replaces Project Neon 5) provides packages of KDE Git master for KDE Frameworks and Plasma 5. Install them on your Kubuntu system to work with KDE Git.
openSUSE Build Service
The openSUSE Build Service provides packages of KDE Git master for KDE Frameworks, Plasma, Applications and Extragear. It offers repositories for Tumbleweed and the latest stable (Leap) release.
Docker
The docker container keeps the target KDE separate from the working installation, so no "contamination" with unstable code can occur.