How to build kdeutils
Every once in a while I end up in some bug report telling someone to build the source and test some patch or checkin. While we already have some KDE build instructions they are often a bit to intrusive when you only want to build a single package or application. So here is my quick guide on how to build kdeutils without messing up your complete system. This will probably work for most other packages (like e.g. kdenetwork) too. Where it will probably cause trouble if you want to rebuild parts of the "core system", i.e. kdelibs, kdepimlibs, and kdebase.
What you need to install
As you usually have installed the KDE packages from your distro you should also install these packages from there. This allows you to build agains your currently running system and minimizes the amount of time and disk space you will need.
- CMake
- Subversion
- kdelibs-devel
- kdepimlibs-devel
- all of their dependencies
If you want to build ark you will need some additional development packages for the archive libraries like libarchive-devel and libzip-devel.
How to checkout and build
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdeutils/ mkdir build cd build cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .. make
This would build the current development version that will eventually become KDE 4.2. If you want to build the 4.1 branch instead use branches/KDE/4.1 instead of trunk/KDE. The prefix should match the place where your distribution installs the packages, which is usually /usr. The build type Debug will make the backtraces usable, Release is another option that results in smaller and usually faster applications but useless backtraces.
If you want to check only a specific application out of this package you can change into the correct subdirectory before doing make, e. g.:
chdir kgpg
will build only this application. When everything works fine the application can usually be started directly from the build directory. Otherwise you will probably need root permissions to do:
make install