Documentation Development Beat/KDE4DevelopmentPlatform

KDE 4 Development Platform

Fedora 8 includes KDE 4.0 (beta) development libraries. The following new packages are provided:

• kdelibs4: KDE 4 libraries
• kdepimlibs: KDE 4 PIM libraries
• kdebase4: KDE 4 core runtime files

Use these packages to develop, build and run KDE 4 applications within KDE 3 or any other desktop environment.

The kdebase4 package also includes a beta version of the Dolphin file manager as a technology preview. As this is a beta version, some issues may still be present. If you need a stable version of Dolphin, please install the d3lphin package, which is based on KDE 3 and can be safely installed alongside kdebase4.

These packages are designed to:

• comply with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), and
• be completely safe to install in parallel with KDE 3, including the -devel packages.

In order to achieve this, Fedora KDE SIG members made 2 changes to the -devel packages:

• The library symlinks are installed to /usr/lib/kde4/devel or /usr/lib64/kde4/devel depending on system architecture.
• The kconfig_compiler and makekdewidgets tools have been renamed kconfig_compiler4 and makekdewidgets4, respectively.

These changes should be completely transparent to the vast majority of KDE 4 applications that use cmake to build, since FindKDE4Internal.cmake has been patched to match these changes.

Note that kdebase4 does not include the KDE 4 Desktop package kdebase-workspace and its components such as Plasma and KWin version 4. The kdebase-workspace package is still too incomplete and unstable for daily use and would conflict with KDE 3.