Version: 1.12.1 (using KDE 4.6.0) OS: Linux When building kde nothing works because I don't have the required mandatory -dev packages not installed. Collecting all the stuff is a huge work. I have to start cmake manually, look at the messages and then search the required packages. Examples are: dbus-dev libdbus-1-dev libattica-dev liblzma-dev libbz2-dev libdbusmenu-qt-dev libpcre++-dev libudev-dev libaspell-dev libxslt1-dev libgif-dev libjpeg8-dev libpolkit-gobject-1-dev libpolkit-agent-1-dev libboost-all-dev libsasl2-dev libical-dev libgpgme11-dev And I am currently only half way through. Reproducible: Always Expected Results: You could display the missing mandatory packages or have a special mode that tries to figure out what you need to start, not including optional packages.
Almost a dup of bug 263936 (I'll let you decide whether you want to piggyback on that bug or not). I don't really have the time to keep up-to-date lists of build requirements for each particular distro so I probably will not add special code to check for that. On the other hand, many package managers have a way for installing the build dependencies of a given package and so if there's an easy way to a) verify the distro kdesrc-build is running under and b) verify through the package manager the build dependencies are installed for e.g. kdelibs I don't mind that, as the burden of staying up-to-date shifts mostly to the package manager. Also note that some of those packages can themselves be built by kdesrc-build (polkit-qt-1, dbusmenu-qt, attica, etc.) although as long as the distro's version works there's no reason to do so from kdesrc-build.
We currently have --install-distro-packages, and the list of distro dependencies is regularly updated.