Basic troubleshooting
What to do in case of build issues
Last updated
KDE Developer Platform
What to do in case of build issues
Last updated
Did one or more modules fail to build (displayed in red font) using kdesrc-build? This page should tell you the most likely causes and how to fix them.
Remember that you can contact the development team to get assistance with kdesrc-build.
The most likely reason is that you are missing the dependencies necessary for the failing module. Once kdesrc-build finishes its build and fails, it will display the path to the module's CMake log files (for example: ~/kde/src/log/latest/kwallet/error.log). You should take a look at the log files to see if anything is missing: you can read more about how to understand the errors you get from CMake in [Install the dependencies]({{< ref "help-dependencies" >}}). That page will also tell you how to search for dependencies in your distribution. When you have the necessary dependencies, you can save time and resume from the failing module with the --resume-from flag:
Sometimes a project has suffered big enough changes to its code that its cache starts to affect subsequent builds.
To clear the cache, you can use the --refresh-build flag:
It is rare, but if the master branch of a project contains faulty code, it will not compile with kdesrc-build.
To check, look at the Invent, KDE's Gitlab instance where all code is stored. If the project has a GitLab build pipeline and the pipeline is broken, then it's not your fault.
Did the project build successfully, but it does not run as intended? Here are a few reasons why.
Sometimes some changes to a project's code (or one of its dependency libraries) lead to its installed files to be renamed or moved. When that happens, the old files might still linger in ~/kde/usr.
There are multiple ways to address this:
You can just always run kdesrc-build with the --use-clean-install flag. This will call the uninstall target of CMake that KDE projects using extra-cmake-modules have, uninstalling previously installed files before installing new ones. This will decrease the speed of installing files built with kdesrc-build.
You can nuke your current installed files with rm -rf ~/kde/usr and then rerun kdesrc-build.
You can start with a new and clean kdesrc-build installation. This can be done by creating a new user and installing kdesrc-build from scratch. Another possibility is to rename your existing development setup with mv ~/kde ~/kde~bak and then rerun kdesrc-build.
