5.2. Building Qt

KDE Builder supports building the Qt toolkit used by KDE software as a convenience to users. This support is handled by a special group named qt6-set. It is defined here.

Note

Qt is developed under a separate repository from KDE software located at https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/.

In order to build Qt, you should make sure that the qt-install-dir option is set to the directory you'd like to install Qt to, as described in the section called Editing the configuration file.

Now check if you are using default build configs. This is done by this config line:

include ${build-configs-dir}/kde6.yaml: ""

If this is the case, you are on a safe side.

If for some reason you are not using default build configs, then you should ensure that the qt6-set group is added to your kde-builder.yaml before any other projects in the file. Then you should verify that the repository option and branch options are set appropriately.

The repository option if set to "qt6-copy", is to build Qt using a mirror maintained on the KDE source repositories (no other changes are applied, it is simply a clone of the official source). This is highly recommended due to occasional issues with cloning the full Qt framework from its official repository.

You can find out available branches here.

Most likely, you would want to exclude qtwebengine from building, as it has significant build requirements. To do this, add it to "ignore-projects" in your config:

global:
  ignore-projects:
    - qtwebengine

Now you can just run the following command:

kde-builder qt6-set