kdesrc-build is a tool to allow you to easily build KDE from its source repositories.

Latest Release: kdesrc-build 1.15.1.

However, the development version of kdesrc-build is currently recommended, see the latest news post for more information.

Latest News:

2012-Oct-05

There is no new release at this point, but improvements continue to be made in the development version of kdesrc-build. It is recommended to run this development version in general due to the periodic changes that continue to be made within the KDE source code structure.

To checkout the development version of kdesrc-build, you can run:

    git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdesrc-build

using a terminal program (like Konsole). Run that command from the directory you want kdesrc-build to be saved in.

To update an existing kdesrc-build development checkout you can run:

    git pull

from within the kdesrc-build directory.

2012-May-21

kdesrc-build 1.15.1 has been released. This release makes kdesrc-build easier to package by improving the test suite and looking for distribution-standard variants of some required tools. A couple of very minor bugfixes are also included. See the release page for full details.

2012-May-05

kdesrc-build 1.15 has been released. This release has seen many bugfixes and improvements, mostly along the lines of improving support for the KDE Project Database infrastructure. See the release page for full details.

2011-Sep-21

kdesrc-build 1.14.1 has been released. This release mainly contains a new feature to allow kdesrc-build to automatically remove old source directories from pre-1.14 kdesrc-build checkouts, which was causing errors for 1.14 users, and a couple of other minor bugfixes. See the release page for full details.

2011-Sep-17

kdesrc-build 1.14 has been released. This release contains quite a few minor feature additions and bugfixes, and starts on reorganizing the internal structure of the code for ease of maintainability. In addition the standard updates to the sample configuration file have been made to account for changes in the KDE source repository layout. See the release page for full details.

2011-Feb-27

kdesrc-build 1.13 has been released. This release contains support for the KDE module project database to allow for building groups of modules based on their grouping in the module database. Many other minor new features, adjustments, and bugfixes are included. See the release page for full details.

The major items I'd like to achieve in the next release are to move the "standard/sample" configuration file into git to make it easier to keep up-to-date with changes to the kdesrc-buildrc-sample, and to add dependency information in git so that modules built from projects.kde.org are built in a proper order.

2011-Feb-24

kdesrc-build itself has moved to projects.kde.org-based git infrastructure, as of a couple of weeks ago. There has been a great deal of activity since, especially in order to support detecting and building modules from the projects.kde.org database.

In addition, other KDE software continues to migrate to KDE's git infrastructure, so if you have software stop building please look at the latest update to kdesrc-buildrc-sample as a guide toward how you should update.

This will get better in the future for a couple of reasons:

1. Although not planned for the very next release (1.13), I plan on having kdesrc-build use a git-hosted "default template" kdesrc-buildrc, which would be kept up-to-date by myself and other KDE developers just as the current kdesrc-buildrc-sample is kept up-to-date. In this case however, kdesrc-build would actually learn about any changes on every source update.
2. kdesrc-build's support of the projects.kde.org database means that it will be possible to build changed modules by using the updated database directly. It is not /quite/ as simple as just building modules from the database, as things like dependency tracking have to be added to kdesrc-build to make it work in all cases.

Features

• Will automatically checkout and update the KDE source code from its source repository. Both Subversion and git repository types are supported.
• Easily supports building specific branches, tags, or even revisions of a module (or all of KDE).
• Supports speedy initial checkouts of modules (KDE Git projects only) by using the snapshots already available on the KDE project network.
• Supports a "dry run" mode (the --pretend) option so that you can experiment with different settings non-destructively.
• kdesrc-build can download modules (both initial checkout and updates) even while building modules that have already been updated.
• kdesrc-build supports uninstalling modules (manually, or prior to installing an already-installed module) in order to keep the install directory clean. Note that this feature requires CMake support and is still experimental.
• kdesrc-build logs everything for easy perusal later, that way you can determine why things went wrong if a build fails. kdesrc-build automatically creates symlinks for easy access to the last log (log/latest).
• color-coding of the output (which can be turned off)
• Has support for building the Qt Project's Qt library, which is a prerequisite for KDE software.
• kdesrc-build is very customizable. You can control most options down to a module-by-module basis if you so desire, including configure-flags, CMake flags, and your C++ flags during compilation. Instead of trying to remember what configure line you used, you can set it once and forget it.
• Extensive documentation. Feel free to let me know if you need something explained (e-mail address at bottom), or contact the kde-devel mailing list.
• A detailed sample configuration file is included, usually you can just copy it to ~/.kdesrc-buildrc and be done with it.
• Much more!