Introduction to Git
At the help forums, we often say things like:
- "it is in master now"
- "it is in <some weird name, like kmess-2.0.x> now"
- "the Git version of KMess contains this feature"
- "fixed in <letters and numbers>"
- or in old posts, "fixed in SVN"
It's a way of saying something will be available in the next release of KMess. "Git" is the software we use to store the in-development version of KMess. It tracks all changes which are made to the code of KMess. The code in Git will eventually become the new KMess release.
Note that the Git version is often the equivalent of an "alpha" or "beta" release! At times, it contains bugs because features are added or changed. At other times, it can actually be quite stable. You can access our Git code if you like to see the bleeding edge developments of KMess, see what it looks like, try new things out, and report bugs, etc..
All of our development is kindly hosted on GitHub:
Prerequisites
To install KMess from Git you need to have the following applications installed:
- Git
- CMake
- Qt 4.4 or greater, with developer data
- KDE 4 desktop or just its libraries (kdelibs, kdebase4-runtime), along with developer data
The names of packages required to build KMess is different between each Linux distribution,
unfortunately.
On Ubuntu or Kubuntu, you can install them very easily. You just have to place a checkmark
before the "Source code" option in the 'Software Sources' dialog, from the System menu
> Administration submenu. Then reload them and ask Ubuntu to fetch the packages for you:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-dep kmess
For the other distros, here's what you need, along with reference package names on openSUSE
and Ubuntu/Debian; these can help you (or at least hint you..) to find them on your distro.
-
Tools: CMake, GNU gettext, the GNU GCC compiler.
- On OpenSUSE, cmake, gettext, gcc-c++
- On Ubuntu, cmake, gettext, build-essential -
The KDE 4 libraries: LibKDE4.
- On OpenSUSE, libkde4-devel
- On Ubuntu, kde-dev or if that doesn't work, try with kdelibs5-dev (not a typo) -
Login data encryption library: GCrypt.
- On OpenSUSE, libgcrypt-devel
- On Ubuntu, libgcrypt11-dev -
XML handling library: LibXML.
- On OpenSUSE, libxml2-devel
- On Ubuntu, libxml2-dev -
XSL Transformation library: LibXSLT.
- On OpenSUSE, libxslt-devel
- On Ubuntu, libxslt-dev -
For auto-away, the XScreenSaver XOrg extension: LibXSS.
- On OpenSUSE, xorg-x11-libs
- On Ubuntu, libxss-devel
Downloading from Git
If you never compiled from source before, also install the packages mentioned at the "Installing from source code" section at the installing help page.
After installing those packages, you can use our little script (which you can download here), which can do the most basic Git operations (getting the code and updating it) for you. It can also automatically update itself, launch it without parameters to find out what it can do!
If, however, you wish to use Git manually, then click here!
Getting a development version
Open the script from this link, and save it where you want to have the kmess source code. Then, open a terminal and navigate to that directory.
-
Use this command to get the stable development version:
sh kmess-git.sh clone stable
-
Use this command to get the unstable development version:
sh kmess-git.sh clone unstable
Now you have a working source tree :)
To update the code, simply run:
sh kmess-git.sh update
Installing a development version
You'll have to compile the source code in the directory before it can be installed. This process converts to source code to a runnable program.
The build system of KDE 4 is based on cmake. To make things more familiar for you, we have created a ./configure script just like KMess 2.0.6 had. To build KMess Git shapshots, navigate to the kmess source directory, then run the following commands:
./configure make -j2 sudo make install
The last command will install KMess Git, and asks for your root password first.
Running a full debug version
To enable all debugging features of KMess, you can build a full-debug version using the following commands:
./configure --buildir=build-debug --enable-debug-output --build-type=debugfull make
You can either run KMess 3.0 from ./build-debug/src/kmess or install it over your current KMess installation using make install.
The debug version is slower and uses more memory, but if something goes wrong, it does give you a lot of information on what's going on.
Receiving update notifications
If you like to be informed in detail with the modifications made to the Git code, you can click on the "Watch" icon for the "kmess" repository in our GitHub repositories page. You will receive an e-mail message each time a developer modifies the KMess Git code.
You can also use RSS to keep an eye on us! Just go to our list of commits pages for master and/or kmess-2.0.x, and subscribe to the RSS feed.
Also watch the developer blogs. Cool new features will be advertised there too.
Finally, a detailed overview of all recent activity can be requested by:
- Running the command: git pull origin; git log in the source folder.
- Visiting trac.kmess.org/timeline, which also displays bug tracker activity.
