Introduction to SVN
At the help forums, we often say things like:
- "it is in SVN now"
- "the SVN version of KMess contains this feature"
- or just: "fixed in r1234"
It's a way of saying something will be available in the next release of KMess. "SVN" stands for subversion, which 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 SVN will eventually become the new KMess release.
Note that the SVN 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 SVN if you like to see the bleeding edge developments of KMess, see what it looks like, try new things out, and report bugs, etc..
Browse SVN repositoryDownloading SVN
To install KMess from SVN you need to have the following applications installed:
- Subversion
- CMake
- Qt 4.4 or greater, with developer data
- KDE 4 desktop or just its libraries (kdelibs, kdebase4-runtime), along with developer data
To learn the package names used by your distribution, please refer to this topic at our forum.
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 run the following command:
svn checkout https://kmess.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kmess/trunk/kmess/
And navigate to the created directory:
cd kmess
Installing the SVN snapshot
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 SVN, run the following commands:
./configure make su -c 'make install'
The last command will install KMess SVN, and asks for your root password first.
Upgrading the SVN snapshot
Each time the SVN version is updated, you can run the following commands to upgrade to the latest KMess-SVN version:
svn update make make install
This is much faster then downloading and recompiling all SVN code again.
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 SVN code, you can subscribe to the kmess-commits mailing list. You will receive an e-mail message each time a developer modifies the KMess SVN code.
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: svn update; svn log --limit 20 | less in the source folder.
- Visiting trac.kmess.org/timeline, which also displays bug tracker activity.
