Quassel IRC - Installation Notes ================================ These should help you to install Quassel IRC from source. Note that this focuses mostly on building on Linux; please feel free to send patches for build instructions on other platforms. We are not familiar with them. There are three versions of Quassel that can be built: * quasselcore - The server daemon. Typically runs on a headless server and is permanently online. The core connects to IRC and stores both settings and backlog. * quasselclient - The GUI client. Requires a running quasselcore to connect to. Upon connection, the client will fetch all session data and a certain amount of backlog from the core and restore its session almost as if you were never gone. * quassel - This standalone version, often called "monolithic" or "mono client", contains both a client and a core and can be used like a "normal" IRC client, without having to setup a server daemon. Prerequisites ------------- Of course, for building Quassel you need the usual set of build tools, for example a compiler. As we use a subset of the C++11 standard, we require a fairly recent compiler: - gcc 4.7+ (available for most platforms), or - Clang 3.2+ (available for most platforms), or - XCode 4.6+ (available for Max OS X and based on Clang), or - Visual C++ Nov 2013 CTP (available for Windows™), or - any other compiler with decent C++11 support Furthermore, CMake 2.8.9 or later is required (2.8.12 for KDE Frameworks). As Quassel is a Qt application, you need the Qt SDK, either Qt 4.8+ or Qt 5.2+. There are several optional dependencies; we will talk about that later. Compiling Quassel - short version --------------------------------- Quassel uses CMake as its build system. The canonical way to build any CMake- based project is as follows: cd /path/to/source mkdir build cd build cmake .. make make install Compiling Quassel - long version -------------------------------- First of all, it is highly recommended for any CMake-based project to be built in a separate build directory rather than in-source. That way, your source checkout remains pristine, and you can easily remove any build artifacts by just deleting the build directory. This directory can be located anywhere; in the short example above, we've just created a directory called "build" inside the source checkout. From inside the build directory, you can then run the "cmake" command, followed by the path to the source. Additionally, you can append various options. Note that CMake caches the options you provide on the command line, so if you rerun it later in the same build directory, you don't need to specify them again. Quassel supports several options to enable or disable features, and can make use of several optional dependencies if installed. CMake will give a nice summary of all that after its run, so we'll just mention the most important options here: -DWANT_(CORE|QTCLIENT|MONO)=(ON|OFF) Allow to choose which Quassel binaries to build. -DUSE_QT5=ON Build against Qt5 instead of the default Qt4. Note that you should empty your build directory when switching between Qt versions, otherwise weird things may happen. -DWITH_KDE=ON Enable integration into KDE4 (with Qt4) or KDE Frameworks (with Qt5). -DWITH_OXYGEN=(ON|OFF) Install the parts of the Oxygen icon set Quassel uses. Oxygen is the default icon set for KDE4, and thus already available on systems where KDE4 is installed. By default, WITH_OXYGEN is ON iff WITH_KDE is OFF. If you are sure that you have the icon set already installed on your system regardless, use this option to disable installing the bundled icons. -DWITH_WEBKIT=OFF Use Webkit for showing previews of webpages linked in the chat. Requires the QtWebkit module to be available, and increases the client's RAM usage by *a lot* if enabled at runtime. Note also that Webkit frequently crashes especially on Windows. -DEMBED_DATA=(ON|OFF) Specifies whether Quassel's data files (icons, translations and so on) should be installed normally, or embedded into the binaries. The latter is useful if you want to run Quassel from the build directory, or don't want to use a standard installation. In particular, EMBED_DATA defaults to ON on Windows and OS X, and to OFF on Linux. You can find the list of optional packages for additional features in CMake's feature summary; install missing packages for enabling the functionality listed in the explanation. If you want to forcefully disable an optional feature, use -DCMAKE_DISABLE_FIND_PACKAGE_Foo=TRUE, where "Foo" is the package name listed. Quassel also supports the usual CMake options, most importantly -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/prefix/path - specify the installation prefix -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=(Debug|Release|RelWithDebug) - specify the build type If you want to narrow down the languages to be installed, you can set the LINGUAS environment variable with a space-separated list of language codes, for example LINGUAS="de en_US". After running CMake, you can just run "make" in the build directory, and "make install" for installing the result into the installation prefix.