Shortcut to a KDE 4.9 on Windows development environment

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi!

It had been quite a while since I last tried to get a KDE on Windows 
development environment, using emerge. Meanwhile, for building RKWard on 
Windows, I had been resorting to a hack[1]. However, that always had some 
small quirks (such as no translations), and importantly, it was never suited 
for debugging platform-related issues e.g. in kdelibs.

Around three weeks ago[2], I set out to get a "real", emerge based, 
development environment of KDE (4.9). The day before yesterday, I finally 
succeeded. Well, I wasn't working on this on all days, and at most a few hours 
on the days I did. Still, this was _much_ more troublesome than I had 
expected. In fact, if I had expected it to be _this_ time consuming, then 
probably I would have continued to go with the hack, instead. Well if I ever 
needed a reminder, this exercise has taught me this: The entry barrier towards 
developing (on top of) the KDE platform on Windows is considerable.

As a small contribution to lowering the entry barrier, I simply 7zip'ed up my 
kderoot, and put it up for download at [3]. This is a build of the 4.9 branch, 
MinGW4, 32bit, RelWithDebInfo, built on WinXP. This does _not_ include 
everything (essentially just what I needed, myself), but the central 
dependencies kde-runtime, kdelibs, kdepimlibs are supplied, and then some. 
Also includes sources, and of course emerge itself. Download size is around 
2.5GB, 6.5GB unpacked.

So: If you've been struggling to set up a KDE on Windows development 
environment, or you've been too scared to even try: Consider giving this a 
try. One less excuse for not testing your KDE work on the Windows platform.

More details and instructions in the README at [3]. Hope this is useful to 
some. Let me know if it works / does not work for you.

Regards
Thomas

[1]: lists.kde.org/?l=kde-windows&m=133951510507720&w=2
[2]: Actually, it was rather six weeks ago. But at first I was struggling with 
problems that had little to do with KDE on Windows.
[3]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rkwardextras/files/Development/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-windows/attachments/20121213/b0b953b2/attachment.sig>