Editing the configuration file

2.3. Editing the configuration file#

In the previous page, it was described how to generate the configuration file. The default location is in ~/.config/kde-builder.yaml.

The default settings should be appropriate to perform a KDE build. Some settings that you may wish to alter include:

  • branch-group, which can be used to choose the appropriate branch of development for the KDE modules as a whole. There are many supported build configurations, but you will likely want to choose kf6-qt6 so that KDE Builder downloads the latest code based on Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6.

Tip

KDE Builder will use a default branch group if you do not choose one, but this default will change over time, so it's better to choose one so that the branch group does not change unexpectedly.

  • source-dir, to control the directory KDE Builder uses for downloading the source code. This defaults to ~/kde/src.

  • install-dir, which changes the destination directory that your KDE software is installed to. This defaults to ~/kde/usr, which is a single-user installation.

  • cmake-options, which sets the options to pass to the CMake command when building each project. Typically, this is used to set between "debug" or "release" builds, to enable (or disable) optional features, or to pass information to the build process about the location of required libraries.

Tip

KDE Builder sets the option num-cores to the detected number of available processing cores. You can use this value in your own configuration file to avoid having to set it manually.

Configuring Make to use all available CPUs, with exceptions#
global:
  # This environment variable is automatically used by make, including
  # make commands not run by KDE Builder directly, such as Qt's configure
  set-env:
    - MAKEFLAGS: -j${num-cores}
  …

…

group big-group:
  repository: kde-projects
  use-projects:
    - calligra
  make-options: -j2 # Reduced number of build jobs for just these projects

Note

Some very large Git repositories may swamp your system if you try to compile with a too many build jobs at one time, especially repositories like the Qt WebEngine repository. To maintain system interactivity you may have to reduce the number of build jobs for specific modules.

Configuring Make to use all available CPUs, with exceptions gives an example of how to do this.