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. If there are any error messages 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>

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.

Troubleshooting

If a package fails to build, you'll be greeted with something like:

 ...
 emerge warning: while running make cmd: jom
 emerge warning: Action: compile for libs/qt5/qtbase FAILED
 *** Emerge all failed: all of libs/qtbase failed after 0:07:25 ***
 emerge error: fatal error: package libs/qtbase all failed

In order to figure out what failed, grep the command line output above for errors.

If the log output is too long, you can also pipe the output to a file and then open the file inside an editor.

 emerge qt > log 2>&1
 notepad++ log

Grep for "error", or "error:" in the file.