after installing the kdesdk package you should be able to install and run the kdevelop package without errors.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I did not try to recompile kdevelop myself, since I can now use the precompiled package...
strace is a standard unix tool, that allows you to see which system calls are being used by a program.
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/strace.1.html
With kdevelop I got an output containing:
open("/opt/kde/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/./libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/qt/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/opt/kde/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/./libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/qt/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/X11R6/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 14
fstat64(14, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=75029, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 75029, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 14, 0) = 0xb5c44000
close(14) = 0
open("/lib/tls/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/libcvsservice.so.0", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Which suggested my that the file libcvsservice.so.0 was missing, which seemed to be contained in the kdesdk package.
I ran strace as follows:
strace kdevelop 2>kdeveloptrace.txt
"2>kdeveloptrace.txt" is there to redirect the standard error output to a text file so I can easily read it.
Ow, and about compiling, somewhere in the kdevelop bugs I read the slackware users wanting to compile kdevelop themselves, needed to explicitely specify the path to berkelydb to the configure script (there is an option for this, see "configure --help" in the kdevelop source dir.)