Development on KDE platform

Question

I'm interested in learning about kde environment. So I read the contribution page on wiki, git cloned the kompare repo and built it. But an attempt to execute the binary gave me an error saying Could not load our KompareNavigationPart. The console showed the following error about kservice:

> ./kompare
kf5.kxmlgui: cannot find .rc file "kompareui.rc" for component "kompare"
kf5.kservice.services: KMimeTypeTrader: couldn't find service type "Kompare/ViewPart"
Please ensure that the .desktop file for it is installed; then run kbuildsycoca5.
kf5.kxmlgui: cannot find .rc file "kompareui.rc" for component "kompare"
Aborting aboutToFinish handling.

I couldn't find anything about it in the readme or the project wiki. I've installed the kde-development-meta package on arch linux. Can anyone help me get started with development on kde platform?

Answer 1

Short answer: Use "cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr" and "make install".

Long answer: It looks like you tried to run from the build directory, but the KDE plugin loader does not look there by default. You could adjust the various path variables to additionally point to your build directory. The variables are mentioned at https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source#Set_up_the_runtime_environment

You can also use "make install" to install to a run-time directory. If you did not change the defaults of cmake via -D option, this will be "/usr/local/", and in this case you also have to adjust the various path variables to include that directory, unless your distribution already configured this for you.