Michael Pyne's personal blog

2 new kdesrc-build releases

by mpyne

So after 6 months of work I released kdesrc-build 1.14 with quite a few changes/fixes. 4 days later I released 1.14.1 (mostly to help mitigate an effect of a change in 1.14 which I’ll cover at the end). Without further ado, I’ll list some of the important changes.

  • You’ve probably already noticed, but the “qt-kde” module on git.kde.org is no more, and has been moved to be “qt”, a simple clone of Nokia’s Qt 4.8 (and prior) codebase (there’s no mirror of the upcoming even-more-split Qt 5 in development yet). What this means for kdesrc-build users is that they need to adjust their qt-copy module. Unfortunately the module used to build Qt must still be called qt-copy to avoid breaking things.

  • The on-disk layout for source and build directories for modules that come from the KDE project database (i.e. repository kde-projects) has changed. Now the destination directory uses the same path that is present in the hierarchy on projects.kde.org. As an example, kdelibs would be in $src-or-builddir/kde/kdelibs, kdesrc-build would be in $src-or-builddir/extragear/utils/kdesrc-build, etc. This should make it easier to manage the increased number of modules resulting from the move to git.kde.org.

    • To make this easier, kdesrc-build will move your old source and build directories (if they’re detected) when this happens, so you shouldn’t have to waste all your bandwidth or spend an inordinate amount of time rebuilding modules.
    • One problem that was noted with this new arrangement is that it’s possible to have git checkouts nested in other git checkouts (for instance, konsole fits in kde/kde-baseapps, but kde-baseapps is a separate git module). This is not a problem by itself, but can interfere with older checkouts of kde-baseapps. So 1.14.1 introduced the ability to delete existing source directories if they would be in the way of a git-clone. You must pass <em>--delete-my-patches</em> to enable this due to the obvious hazard of losing uncommitted work.
  • A manpage was added, which might prove useful if you don’t have a web browser handy, Internet connection to docs.kde.org, etc. The catch is that the manpage is generated using the KDE docs infrastructure from kdelibs, which might not be present yet when you first run kdesrc-build! ;) Don’t forget to have your MANPATH set to include your KDE man directory.
  • As pointed out in an email by Aaron Seigo to kde-buildsystem some time ago, it really could be easier to setup kdesrc-build on initial run. To that end, a script called kdesrc-build-setup is included. It’s generated config is *very* simplistic at this point but it’s better than what was there before. To allow for bootstrapping a GUI without having KDE installed the setup script uses the console just like kdesrc-build.
  • kdesrc-build makes the kde: Git alias (which is recommended by git.kde.org admins) available if you haven’t set it up yet.
  • The use of git snapshots is supported for git-clone now, but only for modules from the KDE project database. My understanding is that this should save CPU load on the git.kde.org infrastructure (although not much in the way of bandwidth). Resuming of aborted downloads is not supported yet unfortunately. If this causes problems use ‑‑no‑snapshots to disable (as of 1.14.1, where that option works again…).
  • You can include other files in your configuration file, for those who actually use the kdesrc-build feature supporting different configurations depending on what your current directory is.

  • As a final excerpt, it is possible to ask for all modules under a given KDE project module to be built. This is actually required for kdegraphics (at least when I implemented this) since kdegraphics supports a SuperBuild-style repository which will check out all of its dependent submodules and build it for you. You can also build the submodules individually, so to keep people from accidentally building them both the kdegraphic base repo is marked as inactive in the database which prevents automated tools (including kdesrc-build) from processing it.

    By using something like:

    module-set graphics
repository kde-projects
use-modules kdegraphics/libs kdegraphics/*
end module-set

    you can for kdesrc-build to build all “active” modules under kdegraphics, even if kdegraphics is itself marked inactive. (The kdegraphics/libs part is to force kdesrc-build to build that first, kdesrc-build will skip duplicate modules so you don’t need to worrk about kdegraphics/* trying to build /libs twice).

  • There’s actually a few more minor things but this post is already too long!

There’s fewer “pure bugfixes” than I expected, but environment variable handling support is improved somewhat, and the KDE project database is actually downloaded in pretend mode when it’s needed (just like the prompt had been saying was happening…).

There has been a fairly substantial refactoring/code reorganization to get to this point. The test suite does pass, but if you’re a heavy user of the kde-languages option you may want to wait until I’ve verified that the l10n building still works (unfortunately cloning such modules makes testing that option more difficult than I’d like).

Other than that I hope you all will be happy with the capabilities of the latest version. I’ll try to release more frequently than every 6 months in the future, that might be a bit easier to achieve at my new duty station near Washington, DC.