nimblebrain's Journal: Good college try at getting KDE 3.2 to compile

This documents my first big attempt to upgrade to KDE 3 on my Red Hat 7.3 box (running on an AMD XP2400+).

Normally, I'm pretty impressed at how well things build and install. I've done extensive work in C++ (mostly on OS/2 at the time) and the dependencies, build processes, library incompatibilities and time-to-compile were nightmarish (4 hour builds to get some debug information linked in hurt a lot). With Linux, you can usually ./configure (if even needed), make and make install and you're done. For individual application, anyhow :) Well, for ones about the same age or slightly newer than your distro, anyhow :) (Thinks back to last week's fights with ksetispy that I couldn't get icons working on :) That's pretty freakishly cool.

Wow, trying to upgrade to KDE 3.2 involved a lot of upgrading. This is something that couldn't reasonably be done over plain modem; not a chance :) I could rant about KPackage bugs (GnoRPM saved the day) or go cross-eyed at how upgrading A means upgrading B and C and D and E at the same time (which distribution is it that has these sorts of issues figured out? :), but that was actually the smoothest part of the whole thing.

The extern errors, the config.h trouble for one library and the final g++ internal error six hours later is just spooky. I feel like I took my entire car apart to reupholster the interior and managed to get it almost put back together, but it won't start :)

If I succeed in my exploits (or if I wimp out and get a binary distribution! :), I'll let you know :)