Konstruct 20061022 review

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"Konstruct" is a build system which helps you to install KDE releases and applications on your system

License: Freeware
File size: 140K
Developer: Konstruct Team
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"Konstruct" is a build system which helps you to install KDE releases and applications on your system. It downloads defined source tarballs, checks their integrity, decompresses, patches, configures, builds and installs them. A complete KDE installation should be as easy as "cd meta/kde;make install".

Konstruct installs himself by default to your home directory which means you don't have to possess root privileges or risk to damage your system or affect another KDE.

Requirements:
A working GNU tool chain (gcc, GNU make, flex, BSD yacc, gettext etc.) and additional GNU tools like tar, gzip, bzip2, md5sum, patch and wget.

Configuration

Copy gar.conf.mk.in to gar.conf.mk and change it to your liking. Common options:

GARCHIVEDIR If you have already downloaded source tarballs set the path here.

prefix Where to install your KDE desktop. Default is ~/kde3.4/ .
Moving KDE installation elsewhere afterwards calls for troubles!

HAVE_64BIT_TARGET Set this if you want to compile KDE for a 64bit target (x86_64)

OWN_CFLAGS Allows you to specify compiler flags specific to your CPU.

HAVE_QT_3_3_INSTALLED Set this if you have at least Qt 3.3 (including moc,
uic and headers) installed and want to skip Qt installation.

BUILD_CLEAN Set this if you're low on available file system space.

If the download fails because of a proxy, then please consult the wget man page
for necessary options in your ~/.wgetrc. If download.kde.org redirects you to a
broken or incomplete mirror you may fix your problem by changing kde.conf.mk.

Usage

Be sure that you have a live internet connection. Choose a target and change to the directory which helds its definition, e.g. "cd kde/kdebase". Now run make with one of the following targets, usually you only need "make install".

The GAR system provides seven basic targets for each package:

fetch

This target downloads all files and patches needed to compile the package.
Typically this is a single tarball, accompanied by occasional patch files.

checksum

Uses md5sum to ensure that the downloaded files match those with which the package maintainer worked.

extract

Makes sure that all of the necessary source files are available in a working directory. In some cases (such as when downloading a single C++ source file) this will simply copy files over.

patch

If the package has to be patched (either via third-party patches or package maintainer patches), this target will perform that step.

configure

Configures the package as specified in the Makefile. It will typically run the package's underlying configuration system (such as autoconf or Imake).

build

Performs the actual step of compilation after installing the dependencies.

install

Puts files in the proper locations and performs any necessary mop-up work.

These targets are named after their counterparts in the BSD Ports system and behave in the same manner. If you want to install a package you have to enter the package's or target's directory and to run "make install" or "make patch" (just two examples). A later target includes all the previously listed ones.

Some additional useful targets which you usually don't require are:

buildclean

Clean up the working directory but don't delete downloaded packages. Run this if you installed missing dependencies and want to re-configure the package.

clean

Clean up the working directory. This also deletes downloaded packages! Either use "buildclean" instead or call "garchive" before to prevent new downloads.

garchive

Call "checksum" target and save downloaded files to GARCHIVEDIR directory.

showdeps

Print a tree with the recursive dependencies of current package.

For every target exists a deep-foo variant which will also call it recursively for all its dependencies, e.g. with "make deep-checksum" you can download all required source tarballs and build it later (when you have no net connection).

What's New in This Release:
Konstruct now installs KDE 3.5.5 and KOffice 1.6.

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