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KDevelop4 Beta4 (on Windows)

We’ve just released the 4th Beta of KDevelop4 and its coming along quite nicely.

This one even compiles on Windows (using MSVC9 aka MS VS 2008) and also is able to load projects. I haven’t been able to try out more things, like file-parsing or code-completion. One thing that won’t work for example for sure is building any cmake project as we don’t yet have any support for nmake.

So the Windows port is not ready for public consumption (as opposed to Beta4 on linux) but it does make progress again.

Setting up Environment for running KDevelop4

These are short and (hopefully) precise instructions what you need to do when you’ve built KDevelop4 from source and installed it somewhere other than your KDE libraries are (those are often from packages and then installed in /usr or /opt/kde).

I’m assuming here that you have the KDE libraries installed in /usr (i.e. from some packages) and that you’ve installed KDevelop4 into $HOME/kdevelop4 (by passing -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kdevelop4 to cmake). If your paths are different just substitute them. Also I’m assuming you’re running KDevelop4 from a terminal and not via the run dialog or via a menu entry, if you want that to work you need to find out how to set environment for the whole X11 session – thats usually distro-specific.

So, first thing to do is setup the KDEDIRS magic environment variable. It tells KDE core components where to search for plugins and other data related to KDE apps and contains just a list of paths (aka prefixes) where KDE libraries and/or applications have been installed.

In my example I set KDEDIRS to point to /usr and $HOME/kdevelop4 as those are the two places where I have KDE4 apps:

export KDEDIRS=$HOME/kdevelop4:/usr


Next thing is to run a KDE tool called “kbuildsycoca4”, this reads various config files that describe which plugins are available and builds a cache from that information. This is necessary so KDevelop can find all its plugins.

And last but not least you can simply run KDevelop by typing “kdevelop” and hitting Enter.

Beta3 and Beta4

Anybody who reads the dot will already know, but for those who don’t (yes I mean you): KDevelop4 has released its third beta. We’ve fixed tons of bugs, added a new launch framework, new C++ features and added a whole new way of switching the perspective from code to debug and back (KDE4.3 only).

However since the tagging on the weekend a week ago, David somehow has gone crazy on fixing all kinds of mysterious (well to me at least) crashes and locks, as well as some speed improvements. Additionally Thomas McGuire – a KDevelop fan and PIMster – sat down, digged in our complex ui-library and fixed one of the most annoying bugs ever found in this still new codebase: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170863 (the one that resizes the mainwindow even in maximized mode when opening the find-bar from kate).

Hence we’ll shortly be releasing another beta (hopefully with some more fixes/improvements for valgrind, the debugger, launch framework and a new progresswidget). I don’t have any date yet as it depends on some administration stuff to be setup first, but you’ll notice when it happens 🙂