Getting the KDevelop documentation browser to work...

[Paul Derbyshire]

...is a nightmare!

Has anyone gotten it to actually work? I obtained an RPM (1.0beta4 IIRC)
and installed it, obtained the KDE library sources and installed them
(annoying thing with those source file RPM packages is there's no visible
indication where they went, usually you have to go grep around for the
files, and usually they also have to be untarred, making you wonder why
they didn't just distribute them as ordinary tarballs...), and after about
eight tries got the thing to generate the KDE lib docs and index them.

(Before anyone says anything about the special rpm flags for working with
source RPMs, I already had working binaries installed by another RPM (and
didn't want to screw that up somehow), so all I wanted was extracted
sources, at which I could then point the documentation generator.)

End result: kdevelop --setup worked perfectly that eighth time, with only
the absence of KTranslate on the downside.

Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. The KDevelop GUI comes up, but is
not obviously usable without reading the extensive documentation first --
and the documentation, despite the successful setup, is nowhere to be
found. All kinds of "index.html" files are missing, and even the
tip-of-the-day file is missing! Either the KDevelop team, or the guy who
packaged the KDevelop RPM I used, or myself made a serious oversight -- and
I don't think I did, since it seems like I did everything you're supposed
to to install. Even the welcome/index.html is absent; the C/C++ language
and library docs; everything.

To make things worse, I have to spend five or 10 minutes rebooting to
Windows every time I find some damned RPM or another has an unexpectedly
absent dependency (like, KTranslator needs libjpeg.so.6 -- I thought I had
libjpeg!? I've been saving JPEGs like the format was going out of style
from GIMP all morning...) or I have an email to send, as Linux refuses to
recognize my modem...


-- 
   .*.  "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-()  <  circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
   `*'  straight line."    -------------------------------------------------
        -- B. Mandelbrot  |http://surf.to/pgd.net derbyshire at globalserve.net
_____________________ ____|________                          Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|