[rkward-users] rkward build problem

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

before I'll turn to helping you, I'll bite the bait. I know, I shouldn't, but 
you *are* asking for it:

On Wednesday 17 October 2012, JohnT wrote (in sligthly different order):
> Why not stick with standard
> Unix/Linux build tools which work?

Because you cannot build KDE applications using standard Unix/Linux build 
tools (where "standard" seems to refer to a state of the world at least five 
years, ago). Ok, yes, in theory, you can. If you spend a couple man-years 
writing the required autotools code (and cross-platform, please), and then 
maintain the resulting mess. Feel free to volunteer.

Believe me, I don't welcome every single decision the KDE team has made for 
KDE 4. But switching the build system from autotools to cmake was a very 
reasonable thing to do. You see, RKWard has been around in KDE 3 times, 
already, and so we were using autotools back then. The "admin" directory, 
containing the automess used to be more than two times larger than the 
remainder of the RKWard code base. Yes, most of that was "borrowed", and even 
completely irrelevant logic, but see - if it's just too complex to maintain, 
you don't have a real chance of sorting it out, without breaking it, either. 
As a reminder, RKWard / KDE was not even available for the Mac or for Windows, 
at the time.

Did those "standard" build tools work? Yes, most of the time. But, in fact, 
users were asking for help building RKWard much more frequently back in the 
day.

No, cmake does not actually make things less complex, overall. But it makes 
the build configuration *modular*, and maintainable. The drawback of 
modularity is that - sometimes - it will not be immediately obvious, where you 
should look for something (such as a missing QT4_AUTOMOC macro). But that's a 
rather affordable price to pay.

> A good configure script should test for
> the presence of needed files and headers, and report that QT4_AUTOMOC
> isn't present, and what version of QT is required for the build. Cmake
> doesn't tell squat.

And a good issue report should include information on installed versions of 
relevant packages, *and* a verbatim copy of the error message, even if it 
doesn't mean squat to the reporter. You see, probably that message *should* be 
improved. But to do so, we need a better picture, what exactly you got, and 
why.

> The source download uses cmake to build according to the configure
> message, but cmake dies trying to perform QT4_AUTOMOC which is said to be
> not needed. Where does QT4_AUTOMOC come from? 

I can't tell you which package to install, exactly (as you did not even 
specify your distribution), but if you install the KDE-libraries *and* 
headers, as specified on line 4 of "INSTALL", that should pull the required 
dependencies. Look for a package called kdelibs-devel, kdelibs-dev or similar 
names. See http://p.sf.net/rkward/compiling for more specific advice, 
including links to binaries, and distribution-specific build rules.

Well, no offense meant. Excuse me for the lecture. You *are* always welcome to 
ask for (more) help on this list. But please do include more specific 
information, and less general rhetoric, next time.

Thanks!
Thomas
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