KDE.SlackBuild
 

I was considering building KDE 3.4 from scratch. I downloaded the source out of the current folder, and the KDE.Slackbuild script didn't seem to work. I haven't taken a look at what the script really says, so I will take a look later. Is this the best way to build KDE? I did it once before, and it takes a minute or two, but seems to work faster. Is it worth it?

Why would you want to rebuld KDE? The speed advantage is practically none existent and it takes hours to compile it.

Why the scipts wont work? Are you executing them as root. What does it say?

Greater speed advantage comes from well written optimizied code. The gcc compiler can only do so much and is has a much lesser impact then the quality of the code has.

Well then why compile anything from source? I definitely have the time available, at night. I thought building everything from source was a good idea. Well, it can't hurt anything, can it?

Binaries may be linked agiant the wrong version libraries and my cause problems. You might want to patch the source first yourself. You may want to pass options to the configure script to enable or disable stuff. Maybe you want to specify the install directory. There are many reasons.

Anything outside of the slack base I always build from source and yes I use specific CFLAGS for my box. Why not since I'm compiling it for my computer. But to go back and recompile stuff that pat compiled already would just be wasting my time, unless there was something very specific I wanted to do... patch it or enable something. Kernel is one thing that I've patched and recompiled. I also patched and recompiled fvwm. Other then that I've pretty much never had a need to recompile anything else from the slack base.

If you want to compile stuff in the slack base to learn or experiment thats good, but don't excpect some big improvement in speed or something.

One reason I compiled KDE 3.4 myself was that I wanted to use gcc-3.4.3 with the visibility patches applied. KDE 3.4 will use the symbol visibility options in gcc if they are present, presumably for optimisation purposes. There's been quite a bit of talk on the net about how much snappier KDE is when compiled this way. Perhaps it is, but I'm not really willing to compile KDE 3.4 all over again with a plain gcc in order to find out!

(KDE just seems to have been getting more and more responsive through the 3.x series to me anyway. 3.3 was good enough for me to switch from icewm and fluxbox. 3.4 marks another improvement.)

Any idea where to get the visibility patches from ?

I got them from a Gentoo mirror. Specifically:

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/distr...es-1.1.tar.bz2

Download and unpack that tarball. There are 26 patches inside. The three you want are:

20_all_gcc34-visibility1.patch
21_all_gcc34-visibility2-20041025.patch
22_all_gcc34-visibility3.patch

These can be applied in the gcc-3.4.3 source tree thus:

patch -p0 -i /path/to/20_all_gcc34-visibility1.patch
patch -p1 -i /path/to/21_all_gcc34-visibility2-20041025.patch
patch -p0 -i /path/to/22_all_gcc34-visibility3.patch

Thanks for the link :D