How to build communi in its own directory

Ensure you know where to find the proper version of Qt that you want to use, and when you invoke qmake, do it from there. For example, Linux distributions will put qmake in the PATH, so qmake -v will print the version of qmake from the distribution. If the distribution has both Qt4 and Qt5, and if you are using qt chooser:

export QT_SELECT=5

Otherwise use the full path to your Qt to find qmake. On Linux or Mac a typical path if you got Qt from the Qt website would be $HOME/Qt/5.X/gcc_64/bin (where $HOME is something like /home/youruser or /Users/youruser). On Windows C: is proposed by the installer instead of $HOME.

To build the libcommuni module where you want, use the configure script:

./configure -prefix $HOME/local/communi

Add -qmake /path/to/qmake if needed. Now, to compile communi-dekstop, tell it where to find libcommuni:

export QMAKEFEATURES=$HOME/local/communi/features

Now specify where to install it (here we choose the same directory where of the library):

qmake -r "COMMUNI_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/local/communi/"

Compile:

make

Install:

make install # no root required :)

And run:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/communi/lib/
$HOME/local/communi/bin/communi

On Mac OS X the line that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH should not be needed.

This is a very clean installation method, since it requires no root privileges, and you don’t affect files in the system. You have to fiddle a bit with the environment in order to build and run, though.