installation diappointment

[Milos Prudek]

While I believe kdevelop is great development tool, it seems very hard
to install. It hides Makefile syntax for developer, but IMHO it requires
strong knowledge of Makefile syntax just to _install_ it!

I'm no profi in C/Makefile, so I grabbed kdevelop rpm. (Yes I have
compiled several dozens tarballs in my life, but why bother?) It does
not contain Kdoc, Ktranslator etc. There is no kdk rpm for RedHat yet.
So I decided to get kdk-1.0a.tar.gz and compile. Alas, configure script
told me in kdevelop phase "You need giflib30. Please install the
kdesupport package". But there is no giflib in kdesupport rpm for
redhat! I thought that configure will take care of everything (as it
always did with other tarballs) and it will not give me a misleading
advice. Or am I supposed to edit Makefile? 

So I downloaded giflib. Fine. Next thing, configure complained about the
lack of jpeglib (sic!) This is actually called libjpeg. And I have it on
my system in /usr/lib/lijpeg.so.6. I solved this by making a symlink
libjpeg.so->libjpeg.so.6.

Also, the kdevelop installed from rpm does not display any widgets in
Widget Editor. Or rather id displays them for a fraction of second abd
then they are gone. Maybe it's because I do not have giflib, but why the
rpm did not tell me so during installation??

This is a disappointment considering the amount of marketing self
propaganda spread over  several introductory pages of Kdevelop help.
Misleading info, missing features, and propaganda. It just feels like
Miscrosoft, so sue me...

--
Milos Prudek