On the command line slim applications are usually preferred, like the diff command and its friends. However sometimes (human eye) pattern matching is not very good on the command line and Gnome or other lightweight desktop environments lack intuitive diff tools. KDE provides kdiff3 and it serves well under Gnome and Mate for Debian since a long time until and including Debian 9.13 Stretch. However kdiff3 under Debian 10 Buster is useless. I am not sure if this is just buggy outside KDE or even inside KDE (it probably is). However kdiff3 is part of my tool chain and if I am working on Debian 10 Buster, I need to move the task to Debian 9.13 Stretch or in case of continuation on Debian 10 Buster, I need to move files or whole directory structures to Debian 9.13 Stretch just for comparison. To circumvent this inconvenience I tried to find alternatives for kdiff3 on Debian 10 Buster under Mate, but did not found a full intuitive replacement so far. The research included meld, diffuse merge tool, vimdiff and kompare. While meld comes close, it is not very intuitive (for me). This document describes some attempts to compile and use different version of kdiff3 on different versions of Debian.
| Debian | kdiff3 | KDE | Qt | Window System | Via | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Bullseye | 1.8.5-1 | 5.111 | package | PASS | ||
| 10 Buster | 1.8 | 5.37+ | 5.8 | source | PARTIAL OK | |
| 10 Buster | 1.7.90 | 5.54.9 | 5.11.3 | xcb | package | FAIL |
| 10 Buster | 0.9.98 | 5 | source | PASS | ||
| 9 Stretch | 0.9.98 | 4.14.26 | package | PASS |
The above Window System is an information provided by the application’s about dialog.
The old version 0.9.98 has its old home page on Sourceforge. And it seems the feature freeze was around 2014-07-04. However there are minor updates and maintenance done from time to time (updated 3 month ago - as of 2020-12-31).
The new version (Buster) seems to be under active development, and provides a port to Qt5, but lacks basic functionality (see conclusion later).
With Debian 11 Bullseye kdiff3-qt aka KDiff3 is not developed any more and replaced by kdiff3.
The current package for kdiff3 provides kdiff3-1.8.5 and is current 1.5 years behind the latest source release 1.9.5 from 2022-02-23. As this is a universal tool it might be advised to read the handbook to understand for example how to use kdiff3 with git.
As prerequisites all packages as in the section Building KDdiff3 1.8.4 On Debian 10 Buster have been installed.
This section introduces two ways of compiling the source. The first will compile and install the binary to /usr/local, the second will modify the qmake project file and install the binary to /srv/kdiff3-0.9.98. For both, due to limitations of the hand made configure script and qmake a custom prefix can not be set on the fly via command line.
For both locations the following has to be set up as root:
export BUILD_USER=USER_ID
export BUILD_GROUP=GROUP_ID
mkdir -p /srv/{src,source,build,kdiff3-0.9.98}
chown $BUILD_USER:$BUILD_GROUP /srv/{build,source,src,kdiff3-0.9.98}The easy way is to use a local user $BUILD_USER:$BUILD_GROUP and build the project for /usr/local:
cd /srv/src
wget https://deac-riga.dl.sourceforge.net/project/kdiff3/kdiff3/0.9.98/\
kdiff3-0.9.98.tar.gz
cd /srv/build
tar xvzf ../src/kdiff3-0.9.98.tar.gz
cd /srv/build/kdiff3-0.9.98
./configure qt4This will build kdiff3 in /srv/build/kdiff3-0.9.98/releaseQt/kdiff3 and it can be used from there. If an installation is needed do as root:
cd releaseQt
make installThe following procedure will compile and install to /srv/kdiff3-0.9.98. Using a source and build directory is not strictly necessary, but helps to understand what will be changed during the build process.
cd /srv/src
wget https://deac-riga.dl.sourceforge.net/project/kdiff3/kdiff3/0.9.98/kdiff3-0.9.98.tar.gz
cd /srv/source
tar xvzf ../src/kdiff3-0.9.98.tar.gz
cp -a /srv/source/kdiff3-0.9.98 /srv/build/kdiff3-0.9.98
cd /srv/build/kdiff3-0.9.98
sed -i -e 's%target.path = /usr/local/bin%target.path = \
/srv/kdiff3-0.9.98/bin%' src-QT4/kdiff3.pro
sed -i -e 's%documentation.path = /usr/local/share/doc/kdiff3%\
documentation.path = /srv/kdiff3-0.9.98/doc/kdiff3%' src-QT4/kdiff3.pro
./configure qt4
cd releaseQt
make installThe binary can be installed in /srv/kdiff3-0.9.98/bin/kdiff3. The application starts also direct from its build location:
/srv/build/kdiff3-0.9.98/releaseQt/kdiff3Building KDiff3 requires the following minimum versions:
Supported compilers:
aptitude install gettext qtbase5-dev extra-cmake-modules libboost-dev \
libkf5i18n-dev libkf5coreaddons-dev libkf5iconthemes-dev libkf5parts-dev \
libkf5doctools-dev libkf5crash-dev cmake gcc build-essentialThis will download, configure and make kdiff3-1.8.4 and install it under /srv/kdiff3-1.8.4
A clean way for cmake is to differentiate between source, build and install directory. We will add the tar archive to src.
As root:
export BUILD_USER=USER_ID
export BUILD_GROUP=GROUP_ID
mkdir -p /srv/{build,source,src}/kdiff3-1.8.4
mkdir -p /srv/kdiff3-1.8.4/share
chown -R $BUILD_USER:$BUILD_GROUP /srv/{build,source,src}/kdiff3-1.8.4On Debian 10 Buster an old version of cmake is used: 3.13.4, which do not have the --install option. For the new version use: cmake --install /srv/build/kdiff3-1.8.4 --prefix /srv/kdiff3-1.8.4 (untested). The following uses the old method.
As user $BUILD_USER:$BUILD_GROUP:
cd /srv/src
wget -nc https://download.kde.org/stable/kdiff3/kdiff3-1.8.4.tar.xz
cd /srv/source
tar xvJf ../src/kdiff3-1.8.4.tar.xz
cd /srv/build/kdiff3-1.8.4
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/srv/kdiff3-1.8.4 /srv/source/kdiff3-1.8.4
make
make installAfter installation kdiff3 can be started:
/srv/kdiff3-1.8.4/bin/kdiff3This is critique is valid for Debian 10 Buster.
Positive
Negative
kdiff3 instance dropped the window managers (Mate) borders and made it hard to terminate via window manager the instance or move it. Termination via menu ‘file’ and ‘quit’ worked. Subsequent starts were omitting the window manger decorations. Even a reboot of the system did not made the window manger reappear again. It just shows “QMainWindow::addToolBar: invalid ‘area’ argument” when started from command line. However the window manager decoration are visible when executing via ‘ssh -X’ from a remote system. The above error message stays, so probably this is not related.diff is primary used to understand the difference between text files, it is mandatory to know if binary files are different (or not) when comparing directories.kdiff3 to KDiff3 without any need (This was also partly observed in the old version)In regard to the problems found in KDiff3 1.8.4 I would recommend to use the old version kdiff3 0.9.98 on Debian 10 Buster. No guarantee. It seems to be an example of software ‘innovation’ were the application now supports Qt5 instead of Qt4 and a “better” build system but a decrease of features and in this case lacks fundamental features, like comparing binary files or handle symbolic links. Sometimes software is like wine, the older one is better.
The compilation is similar to kdiff3-1.8.4, some problems are solved, like the vanishing border. However links let the application crash. So the former conclusion is still valid. However, after using this version on Debian 11 Bullseye from package it could be that the build process introduced this errors.
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.2 | 2022-06-20 | Shell->bash, update Debian 11, hierarchy |
| 0.1.1 | 2020-12-31 | Compilation of KDiff3-1.8.4 on Debian 10 Buster |
| 0.1.0 | 2020-07-07 | Initial release |