Searching for Tao

One of the reasons I switched to Arch Linux was that I didn't want to have to compile all of my packages anymore. However, in leaving Gentoo for the Arch world, I also gave up a certain amount of ease of customisability (is that even a word?). Gentoo does, after all, excel in letting you do whatever you want to your machine and there are some circumstances where that's pretty important... even for users like myself.

Such a situation presented itself when I realised that the KDE binaries shipped with Arch do not include debugging support. This is obviously in place to improve performance, but for a bleeding-edge product like KDE, this also makes it very difficult to offer a good bug report. Thankfully, Arch's build system (abs) allows you to compile any program you want and install it with the package manager with little trouble... so I did just that.

Below is a quick script I wrote to rebuild all of my KDE binaries with debugging enabled. It's commented so you know what's going on:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash

  # Create a workspace if it isn't already there
  mkdir -p $HOME/abs

  # Fetch a list of kde packages from pacman
  PACKAGES=$(pacman -Qs kde | grep -v '^ ' | sed -e 's/ .*//' | sed -e 's/local\///' | grep '^kde')

  # Loop through the package list
  for PACKAGE in $PACKAGES; do

    echo $PACKAGE

    # Copy the package to your workspace
    cp -r /var/abs/extra/$PACKAGE $HOME/abs/
    cd $HOME/abs/$PACKAGE

    # Edit the PKGBUILD file to use debugging
    sed -i -e 's/DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release/DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo/' PKGBUILD;
    echo "PATCHED"

    # Make the package
    makepkg -s

  done

Once you've built all of those (it'll take a long time... KDE is huge), you can install each one with pacman:

  # pacman -U PACKAGENAME-VERSION-i686.pkg.tar.gz

It's also a good idea to recompile qt as well. For that, you just add -debug to the configure list in its PKGBUILD file.

For more information, please visit the Arch Linux wiki page on ABS.