KDE Development VirtualBox

[Gregor Mi]

Hi,

On 27.01.2016 08:12, Martin Graesslin wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 27, 2016 5:09:29 PM CET James Augustus Zuccon wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> Had a look around, but couldn't find much about this.
>>
>> Is there a VirtualBox Image available for KDE Development specifically
>> (with most of the common libraries and their corresponding includes
>> installed)?
> 
> To my knowledge there is no such image.
> 
>>
>> If not, is it worth us creating one to save new developers from having to
>> setup a build environment?
> 
> Not sure whether this makes much sense. Let me explain why:
> 
> * VMs are odd, we have problems with the GPU
> * the build needs to be setup nevertheless, e.g. git needs to be configured
> * the image will be constantly out of date needing a rebuild of the software
> 
> What I think is better is having something based on an up-to-date unstable 
> packages. So that the base is already there and it's easy to just hack on one 
> thing. Oh and good documentation might even be more important.

A propos good documentation: a few days ago, I thoroughly updated the wiki page on how to
build KDE: https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Building

More specifically, most of the time went into updating the section on which packages must
be installed under openSUSE 42.1
https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Building#openSUSE_42.1. I know at least one more
person that used this list for his own openSUSE 42.1 and was happy to successfully build
the modules without much hassle (at least up to the kate module).

>> Any thoughts as to what the best Distro to base this on might be?

So currently, openSUSE 42.1 is the best-documented (or at least most recently updated)
distro when it comes to which packages are needed. In the mentioned section I also
documented some of the packages that did not build on my machine. I did NOT update the
package list for all of the more than 250 modules because I did not need all of them.

The rest of the information on the page is distro-neutral.

So you could use the wiki page and improve it a bit while trying to build KDE. Then the
next guy will have it easier.

On the sections on how to setup the build and runtime environment there is the need for
some cleanup.

Gregor