1. Source and build paths
KDE is using SVN to manage the sourece code of its main project. Nevertheless, a moove ti Git is projected and have already be donne with some of its “extragears” or “playground” programs, as well as many “kdesupport” important libraries. I’ll try to be the more up-to-date as possible but if a program disappears in your SVN repository you will have check the given documentation (habitually all the files of the project are deleted by the update and one or two files are created giving new download instructions).
CMake is used to configure and generate makefiles for the compillation. CMake is a very powerfull system that allows to do partial compillation (only what have been updated) of a project. For a big project like KDE this is very welcome as a full compillation of everything in KDE) can take more than 7 hours a partial compillation (one per week for exemple) can take less than an hour!
You can dowload the source everywhere you want but try to have a consistant organisation as it can be a big mess regarding to the number of project and sub-project. For exemple I have a main /source directory having a kde dircetory. This directory contains all the main categories of the KDE project: kdesupport for support libraries, KDE for core KDE components and libraries, extragears, playground respectively for extragears and playgroud softawares and other for unofficial KDE project.
As KDE team and CMake recommands to use a separate build directory for compilling, the following of this tutorial will use a subdirectory of the source directory named “build”. You can use any other build directory but you will have to change the given cmake command line. For example, cmake ./ ../ <options> means that the source directory is the parent folder (../) and that you are inside the build directory (./).
Whatvever your you do with folder all the installation instructions suppose that you are placed in the build directory before proceeding unless specific instruction.
2. Compillation
Most of the time compillation will run Ok but not always. When upgrading with “svn up” you can just do “cmake ./ && fmake && make install” to compile it. If compillation fail you will have to remove CMakeFile.txt file and try again with the full cmake command line given in the corresponding tutorial.
