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. The codebase uses the C++14 standard, so a reasonably recent compiler is needed: - GCC 5.0+ (available for most platforms), or - Clang 3.4+ (available for most platforms), or - XCode 6.0+ (available for Max OS X and based on Clang), or - MSVC 19+ (part of Visual Studio 2017 on Windows™) Other compilers may work, but are not officially supported. As Quassel is a Qt application, you need the Qt SDK, version 5.5 or higher. Furthermore, the Boost header-only libraries (at least version 1.56) and CMake 3.5 or later are required. CMake will tell you about any missing dependencies when configuring the project. 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) Choose which Quassel binaries to build. -DUSE_CCACHE=ON Enable ccache if the ccache binary is available. This avoids the need for hacks using PATH or the CXX variable to make ccache work. Distributors may want to disable automatic detection if they have their own caching mechanism set up. -DWITH_KDE=ON Enable integration with the KDE Frameworks runtime environment -DWITH_BUNDLED_ICONS=ON Quassel requires a number of icons that are part of the KDE/Plasma icon themes Breeze and Oxygen, but are generally not supported by other themes. In order to avoid missing icons, Quassel bundles the subset of icons it uses from the afforementioned themes, and uses that as a fallback if the system theme does not provide a required icon. If it is ensured that Breeze and/or Oxygen are installed on your system (e.g. through package dependencies), this option can be turned off to save less than 2 MB of disk space. -DWITH_OXYGEN_ICONS=(ON|OFF) Support the Oxygen icon theme. Oxygen was the default theme in KDE 4, and also the bundled icon theme in Quassel before version 0.13. Since the move to Qt5, the more modern Breeze icon theme is preferred, and thus Oxygen is disabled by default. -DWITH_WEBENGINE=ON Use WebEngine for showing previews of webpages linked in the chat. Requires the QtWebEngine module to be available, and increases the client's RAM usage by *a lot* if enabled at runtime. The default is ON. -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 that WebKit support is deprecated and mostly unmaintained in Qt, and should no longer be used for security reasons. The default is OFF. -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.