I am currently at the KDE sprint in Randa, Switzerland. There are about 40 nice people here, working on making KDE software awesome. This year’s focus is on deploying our software more nicely — on Windows and OS X, but on Linux as well.

Especially for user-faced applications like KDevelop, it really makes a big difference whether you use today’s version, or the one from two years ago. Many people run quite old Linux distributions, which do not provide up-to-date packages for KDevelop. Another situation where it can be hard to use an up-to-date version of our software is when you are at your workplace or at a university computer pool, and do not have privileges to install software. Thus in this week, besides enjoying the landscape, I spent some time building a stand-alone KDevelop executable. It is available from here: http://files.svenbrauch.de/kdevelop-linux/. (Update: More up-to-date images are on kdevelop.org/download. I will occasionally publish test builds here though.) The version from 16th June 2016 contains the beta version of KDevelop 5 from the master branch, including the new clang-based C++ plugin and the Python 3 language support plugin.

After downloading, simply make the file executable (either by running chmod +x file or using your file manager’s properties dialog) and run it. If you try, please let me know if it worked and what distribution (and version!) you used — that would be interesting to know.

The executable is built by compiling all our dependencies (most notably Qt, a list of KDE Frameworks, and LLVM) on a very old system, in this case CentOS 6. Then all required libraries are installed into a directory, and the libraries they link against are copied there as well by a shell script. What is stripped out is the base system — glibc, libgl, libX, libxcb, things like that. The idea is that these libraries are forward binary-compatible, and by building on an old system and linking against old versions of those libraries, you can run the resulting programs on any more recent system. You could then simply tar up this tree, and include a script to update a few environment variables and launch KDevelop. A somewhat nicer variant of that, which was used for the above installer, is by using AppImage, which puts all the files into an ISO image and adds a startup header to make it look like an ELF binary. The startup header mounts the ISO using fuse, sets up a few environment variables, and runs the program.

This reminds me of something else I would be interested in: On your computer, do you have fuse installed by default? If that is not the case for a lot of systems, it might be worth publishing a tarball instead.

I did lots of other things at Randa too, but I’ll report on those in followup posts.

If you like what we’re doing here, consider supporting the meeting with a donation!

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Categories: Everything

Tags: installer, kdev-python, kdevelop, linux, planetkde

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