Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mac OS X

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Note: This page is about KDE 4. It isn't applicable for KDE 3 development.

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This section needs improvements: Please help us to

cleanup confusing sections and fix sections which contain a todo

• Note: You may wish to do all of this inside a directory name that ends in .noindex or .build to keep spotlight from indexing all of your temporary build-files as you build them.

[edit] Required Third Party Tools

The following third party tools are required for successfully building KDE on OSX. Many of these libraries can be found pre-compiled in kdesupport.pkg, stringi.pkg, blitz.pkg and soprano.pkg, which can be found here: Projects/KDE on Mac OS X

• AGG
• bzip2
• giflib or libungif
• libart_lgpl
• libidn
• libjpeg
• libmng
• libpng
• libxml2
• libxslt
• libusb
• OpenEXR
• PCRE
• Strigi
• shared-mime-info
• pkgconfig
• subversion (to check out the kde sources)
• dbus

[edit] Verify Compiler Version

• Fink: If your Distribution line in /sw/etc/fink.conf is 10.4-transitional, instead of 10.4, make sure you run sudo gcc_select 3.3 before proceeding with any compiling, or you will end up with binary-incompatible c++ code!
• Manual: run sudo gcc_select 4.0 if you want to be compatible with the pre-made installers.

[edit] Qt/Mac Open Source Edition

Download qt-mac-opensource from http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/mac

Patches are required for a successful build. Download the qt-copy patches through KDE's svn:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/qt-copy/patches/

and apply the patches:

cd qt-mac-opensource-4*
for patch in /path/to/patches/*.diff; do patch -p0 < $patch; done

Note: when applying patches you will get errors when processing x11 specific files (i.e. files that match the pattern *_x11.{h,cpp}), simply skip those patches.

And finally, compile qt-mac:

./configure -prefix /opt/qt4 -qt-gif
make all install

Please note: The Qt/Mac binary edition available from ftp.trolltech.com will not work, because it does not contain the QtDBus module! (tested with 4.3.2)

[edit] CMake

CMake may be downloaded from CVS:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@www.cmake.org:/cvsroot/CMake login

Note: password is "cmake"

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@www.cmake.org:/cvsroot/CMake co CMake

And then compiled and installed:

cd CMake
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde4-deps
make all install

[edit] Setting Up Your Build Environment

Variable must be set to build KDE successfully, and are noted below

• Note: Replace /opt/kde4-deps with the location of your 3rd-party tools, and add your cmake location if you compiled from source

export PATH="/opt/qt4/bin:/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:$PATH"
export CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/kde4-deps/lib"
export CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH="/opt/kde4-deps/include"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/qt4/lib/"

[edit] Building kdelibs

kdelibs must be checked out of svn locally to be built:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs

And then compiled by performing the following:

mkdir kdelibs.build
cd kdelibs.build
cmake ../kdelibs -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/kde4
make all install

[edit] Troubleshooting

If kdelibs fails to compile successfully, check the build status for the latest Nightly Builds and Continuous Builds at http://public.kitware.com/dashboard.php?name=kde

Information about getting and compiling the dependencies can be found at Getting_Started/Build/KDE4 and Getting_Started/Build/KDE4/Prerequisites (pages are Linux focused, but can be useful)

[edit] Using Binaries

If you're interested in just checking things out, binaries for kdelibs and parts of KDE in general are available at Projects/KDE on Mac OS X and are generated semi-regularly.

[edit] Further Reading

For more general information on using CMake, see the CMake Tutorial.