My Tech Notes

Kdiff3 is an excellent utility for GUI-based comparison and merge. However, it is a bit cumbersome to build it properly. Default configuration assumes presence of KDE, so if you are not working from within KDE desktop, you are out of luck. However, there is also "QT only version" which only relies on QT libraries from Trolltech; it is primarily used to build Windows-version of the utility (also very good and highly recommended). If you want to build QT-only version of kdiff3 on a Unix-like system (including Cygwin), here is what to do (based on Kdiff3 version 0.9.92, released in April'07)

1. Make sure you have X development libraries, headers, and fonts installed (included in Cygwin);
2. Make sure you have QT3 installed (>= 3.3) (also included in Cygwin); set environment variable QTDIR, e.g. "setenv QTDIR /usr/lib/qt3"
3. Download Kdiff 0.9.92 source distribution;
4. Untar and go to sub-directory "src"
5. Edit Makefile.qt, primarily compilation option and include directories (you might want to replace -I$(QTDIR)/include with -I/usr/include/qt3)
6. make -f Makefile.qt
7. make -f Makefile.qt install

Enjoy!
UPD (11-March-08). Under Debian (kernel 2.6.18-6-686):

• apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev qt++
• export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt3
• No need to change Makefile.qt

Labels: cygwin, qt