Difficulties Building From Source Code

[Eoin O'Neill]

So I've recently been trying to build amarok (master branch) from source
and I've come across a lot of roadblocks along the way. I've been receiving
a lot of help on IRC thanks to the user heirecka, but I thought I would
share some places where I had (and continue to have) difficulties when it
comes to building from source.

I'm running Kubuntu 18.04 (KDE environment) and I've been following this
guide <https://community.kde.org/Amarok/Development/Development_HowTo>
which resulted in a few roadblocks along the way. Firstly, some
dependencies labeled there have either changed names or are no longer the
correct version. With regards to CMake, there are issues where the option
parameters no longer match the current build's CMAKE options. Specifically,
options such as ' KDE4_BUILD_TESTS=ON ' are now renamed to
'-DBUILD_TESTING=ON'. There are also issues regarding the directory to put
your shell scripts in and also the environment variables you need to
export. For instance, the documentation says you need to do something like
the following:

mkdir ~/.kde/env  # okay if it exists
echo 'export KDEDIR=$HOME/kde' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh
echo 'export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh

However, this seems to be with KDE4 in mind. Modernly, it seems you need to
do something more like the following:

mkdir ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env
echo 'export
QT_PLUGIN_PATH="${HOME}/kde/lib/target/plugins/:${QT_PLUGIN_PATH}"' >>
~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/myenv.sh
echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${HOME}/kde/lib/target/:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"'
>> ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/myenv.sh
echo 'export XDG_DATA_DIRS="${HOME}/kde/share/:${XDG_DATA_DIRS}"' >>
~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/myenv.sh

Now with those changes in mind, I was able to get a version of amarok built
and running.

However, I continue to have a few problems regarding qml widgets. I keep
getting errors regarding missing /kpackage directory which makes it so that
many of the dockable elements are missing or not working as intended. Also,
my current build will no longer work properly if I try to run gmock testing
(-DBUILD_TESTING=ON) despite having the source code on my system.

Many other guides on the internet aren't much better at giving build
instructions as they date back to 2009. I think Amarok has a potentially
strong future, but it would actually help to have an up to date build guide
written by someone familiar with the requirements needed to build modern
Amarok from source.
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