Compiling KDE 4.1
Wednesday 13 August 2008 ◷ 02:42
Since I didn't have a lot of stuff on my mind for a couple of days I decided to screw up my Debian system some more by going for a compiled from source KDE 4.1. I've enough experience with open source stuff to be not very optimistic about getting it all working in the end. Before you know it you are up to your waist in dependencies and if one of them fails it's over. While I do admire the community for releasing open source packages like KDE, building from source shows that it's a lot easier to just buy a Mac. The main issue is that the current state of development means for every little piece of functionality there is a library, and they all have an API, and the chance that the whole cascade of used libraries collapses due to one incompatibility between versions of a library is way to big. Libraries get more specialized, easier to maintain due to the use of other specialized libraries, but beyond one library depending on another a big project like KDE is just to vulnerable to incompatibilities between hundreds of used libraries. In the end - after a lot of tar xvzf && ./configure && make && make install - I got something working which looked like a nice KDE, but along the way I got a lot of errors that showed some libraries lied about their dependencies, and obviously the install was never tested on a system that started from scratch. Of course we can wait for the official distributed packages, but how open source is that?