KDevelop5/Manual/Appendix A: Building KDevelop from Sources

From KDE UserBase Wiki

Building KDevelop from Sources

If you want to have the latest features and bugfixes, you can build KDevelop yourself from the sources.

There is a more detailed article here which uses the kdesrc-build system that builds up-to-date KDE dependencies and then KDevelop. The article also details a configuration change to prevent building all of the KDE dependencies when using kdesrc-build.

Be aware that you could build an unstable version. To help the developers fix bugs, please keep the RelWithDebInfo and report bugs to http://bugs.kde.org, either by hand or using Dr. Konqi.

Requirements

Install for all users

mkdir kdevgit
cd kdevgit
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdevplatform
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdevelop
cd kdevplatform
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
make && sudo make install
kbuildsycoca4
cd ../..
cd kdevelop
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
make && sudo make install
kbuildsycoca4

Install for local user

mkdir kdevgit
cd kdevgit
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdevplatform
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdevelop
cd kdevplatform
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kdevelop4 ..
make && make install
# the following line is needed so that kbuildsycoca4 finds all .desktop files
export KDEDIRS=$HOME/kdevelop4:/usr
kbuildsycoca4
cd ../..
cd kdevelop
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kdevelop4 ..
make && make install
kbuildsycoca4

Please note: Whenever you do some package or distribution update that calls kbuildsycoca4, you need to execute the following lines after the update:

export KDEDIRS=$HOME/kdevelop4:/usr
kbuildsycoca4