[Digikam-users] building it for non-free operating systems

[Vlado Plaga]

Hi Stefan (and others reading this),

I'm surprised to read that you actually did go through the long and
tedious process of building digiKam on both Mac OS and Windows!

Am Mon, 3 Aug 2009 14:50:25 +0200
schrieb Stefan Aschenbach <stefan at binaervarianz.de>:

> But it's unstable as hell.

That is very different from digiKam on Mac OS 10.5, which is quite
usable. I had a few crashes, for example when deleting an album with
pictures in it (reproducible), but I can create albums, add ratings and
tags, use filters, copy pictures... so it is usable, and it is looking
very neat.

By the way: I just noticed Fink already has a digiKam package - but it
is still in unstable (source only), so you might have the same problems
you had with MacPorts.

http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/digikam-mac

> As the whole build with all the dependencies took about two days, I  
> gave it a try on a windows machine while waiting.

Apparently you also still have an old PPC machine. ;-)

If I had an intel mac, I'd be only using Linux by now, but there is no
3d drivers, no Adobe Flash, and no stand-by mode for my iMac when using
Linux, so I like having a dual-boot system with my core applications
available on both systems.

I really don't use M$ Windows, except for testing my web sites in that
damn Internet Explorer.

My opinion on porting digiKam (or other free software) to non-free
operating systems is ambivalent:

On the one hand, we cannot expect developers to pay money just to test
their programs in non-free systems (I paid about EUR 160 for this Mac
OS, and that is without the hardware!). I also kind of like having
great software for me that is not available to people who are not
willing to use free operating systems (elite / punishment thinking).

On the other hand free software projects like Firefox or VLC, which are
nowadays used millions of ordinary Windows users, do much more for the
popularity of free software than the best Linux-only program could ever
do. So I think ports to non-free systems should be made, if possible,
until the majority of users finally works on free systems (which would
imply hardware support for free systems by all companies that want to
sell their computer hardware to as many customers as possible).

Vlado