KDE Plasma build container

What is this?

This container (to be used with Distrobox) includes all build dependencies to get a graphical development session of KDE Plasma running using kde-builder. This is especially nice for image based systems like Fedora Kinoite and Bazzite.

But this also works on traditional systems to not mess up your host with unnecessary build dependencies.

Prerequsities

• bash
• curl
• recent enough version of docker/podman (to support zstd:chunked containers)
• distrobox
• just
• Quite a bit of storage space, for me all of ~/kde takes up 67GB

This also has a couple additional handy tools:

• git
• neovim
• ripgrep
• starship
• zsh

The container is a little bit chunky and is ~3GiB big with compression. But updates with podman pull ghcr.io/renner0e/kde-dev:latest should be somewhat ok due to zstd:chunked partial pulls and chunkah. You can also update the container with dnf upgrade. It could be significantly trimmed down tho.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/renner0e/kde-dev && cd kde-dev

Setup the distrobox:

distrobox assemble create --file ./distrobox.ini

You may also do this manually with the distrobox create -i ghcr.io/renner0e/kde-dev:latest -n kde-dev command

distrobox enter kde-dev

Create kde-builder default config (only once)

kde-builder --generate-config

in the distrobox:

kde-builder plasma-desktop

on the host:

This will install a session file into /usr/local/share/wayland-sessions, make sure it's writable of course

just session

This should be all, now you can log out and select Plasma Development session in SDDM/PLM.

Goodies

Faster compile times

just ccache for convenience

Setting up ccache for super fast compile times - https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-builder-tips/#building-with-ccache-or-sccache

ccache is obviously already preinstalled.

Download ccache used by KDE Linux and put it in ~/.cache/ccache

directory structure should look like this:

❯ tree -d -L 1 .cache/ccache
.cache/ccache
├── 0
├── ...
├── f
└── lock

How do I build this container locally?

Not with docker probably because we rely on the "FROM oci-archive: trick"

See this

buildah build --target base -t localhost/kde-dev . 

With rechunking:

buildah build -t localhost/kde-dev:latest --skip-unused-stages=false -v $(pwd):/run/src --security-opt=label=disable .

Change all the image refs to the one you chose instead of ghcr.io/renner0e/kde-dev:latest

It's not compiling/crashing on start

• Probably just missing a library that hasn't been added to Fedora's .spec files or isn't installed here, find out and then install it with dnf provides "*missing.so*" or it's missing here, PR dnf builddep failedproject

• Linker issues, general build churn due to not clearing out ~/kde/build/project, fixed by removing it, sometimes you might also want to nuke the relevant part or all of the ~/kde/usr tree

• Crashes might be a symptom of a missing library as well (), could be that your host provides example.so.3 but KWin or whatever was compiled with example.so.4 which is not present in the ~/kde/usr tree because the container has newer deps than your host, copy them to ~/kde/usr I guess

Remove/undo all changes

Remove session:

sudo rm /usr/local/share/wayland-sessions/plasmawayland-dev6.desktop

Delete source code and filesystem tree:

See your ~/.config/kde-builder.yaml for all directories.

rm -rf ~/kde/{usr,src,build}

Delete the container:

podman image rm -f ghcr.io/renner0e/kde-dev:latest

Delete kde-builder config:

rm -f ~/.config/kde-builder.yaml