Build Alligator fails with outdated ECMConfig.cmake version

Development
1

Hi,

I am trying to build Alligator on Ubuntu 24.04 and am running into issues when doing cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr

What I tried so far:
Unfortunately build-dep does not find alligator to install its dependencies. Then I tried to install the dependencies listed under requirements just by searching for the nearest sounding packages I find via apt-cache search.

Where I am:
It complains that there is an outdated version of ECMConfig:

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:19 (find_package):
  Could not find a configuration file for package "ECM" that is compatible
  with requested version "6.12.0".

  The following configuration files were considered but not accepted:

    /usr/share/ECM/cmake/ECMConfig.cmake, version: 5.115.0

Does somebody know how to fix this ?
(Btw: I have no clue what ECMConfig.cmake means, and am pretty new to building software. Sorry for the basic question.)

2

The problem here is that you are using Ubuntu 24.04, which will not have the current dependencies required for this.

This is what the error means. The version of the file it found is version 5.115, while it needs 6.12.

The package this file comes from is extra-cmake-modules and the version in Noble is for Qt5, while the one it needs is Qt6. You aren’t going to be able to get that in Noble. This will also depend on Plasma 6 components as well, and that also will be Kubuntu’s Plasma 5 packaging in Ubuntu. 24.04.

Flathub and the Snap Store are options that are perfect for this situation, but without moving to a different distro or to Ubuntu 25.04, you aren’t going to really be able to build this without some effort, kdesrc-build maybe.

1 Like
3

Follow Building KDE software | Developer

It even has a table telling you what is recommended for which use case, building manually with CMake in not up-to-date systems like Ubuntu 24.04 will be more trouble than it’s worth. You can use kde-builder or containers + manual build.

4

This helped quite a bit. The solution ended up being: Upgrade Ubuntu to version 25.04 and following the kde-builder setup, and I can now build alligator. Thank you very much for the help.