Build Problem: "Could not find any plugins on startup"

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 9:58 PM, Miljenko Jakovljevic
<miljenko.jakovljevic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am new to development of kdevelop and kde apps in general.
>
> I have compiled the kdevelop master version on ubuntu artful. After
> installing the libraries needed by cmake as ubuntu packages, the build
> process finishes ok. In the build folder/app there is now a kdevelop binary
> and in build/plugins there are the .so files for different plugins. For
> example for  the class browser plugin, there is the kdevclassbrowser.so in
> build/plugins/classbrowser.
>
> When I start the kdevelop binary there opens a window with the following
> message: "Could not find any plugins during startup. Please make sure
> QT_PLUGIN_PATH is set correctly."
> There is also a link to a page with information about setting the runtime:
>
> export KF5=$HOME/kde/usr
> export QTDIR=/usr
> export
> QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$KF5/lib/plugins:$KF5/lib64/plugins:$KF5/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/plugins:$QTDIR/plugins:$QT_PLUGIN_PATH
>
> Since I was building kdevelop as a standalone program without the kde I
> don't have the $HOME/kde/usr directory. So I set the QT_PLUGIN_PATH to the
> location of the local .so files in kdevelop/build/plugins. I even tried
> putting all the .so into a separate directory and putting that into the
> path. All to no avail.
>
> Is it a preferred approach to build the whole kde from source viz. to use
> the kdesrc-build tool even if one just wants to build kdevelop?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Kind regards!
> Mili
>
> E-Mail: miljenko.jakovljevic at gmail.com
>

I suggest you install it into a separate prefix. If you have a stable
KF5 release you'll have a prefix.sh that sets the right environment
variables.
Just to build kdevelop, cmake and make should be enough.

You can also find information here:
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source

Aleix