Development setup

[Andras Mantia]

On Tuesday, September 27, 2011 20:13:13 Milian Wolff wrote:
> Definitely locally and make sure to wipe your system-wide
> installation, as� otherwise you can get crashes due to binary
> incompatibility.

This is a questionable advice. If you set up your environment correctly, 
things should work fine. I have both KDE in /usr from the distro and self 
compiled one in /opt . There was a time when I had a third KDE version 
as well. Same can be done for KDevelop only as well.

Things you have to set is:
KDEDIR/KDEDIRS, KDEHOME (if you want a separate ~/.kdeFOO dir for the 
local version), KDETMP/KDEVARTMP (to have a different temporary dir for 
e.g. the cache, highly recommended), XDG_DATA_DIRS (to find the plugins), 
PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH (to find your version of the libraries first). 
You should run kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental after the above setup (and 
IIRC every time you install a new KDevelop plugin).
This will work fine, but of course care needs to be taken and in case of 
weird crashes investigated if the right libraries are loaded or not (ldd 
helps a lot).
 The most possible problem could be that your local installation misses 
a library for some reason and the system wide library is used instead. 
If the versions are binary compatible, you won't even notice it, in 
worst case the app will crash.

Anyway, I just wanted to write this down, so people don't end  up 
removing their stable version while developing.

Andras