[KDE/Mac] [OS X] adding a link module to all KF5 targets

[Christoph Cullmann]

Hi,

> Hi Christoph, René and Samuel,
> 
> First of all, gentlemen, let's not argue and get hot under the collar.  The only
> way we are going to get anywhere is by working together, helping each other
> and exchanging information.
Sure, please, nobody should feel insulted, I just stated my opinion.

> 
> On 15/10/2015, at 9:46 AM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
>> On Wednesday October 14 2015 23:46:14 Christoph Cullmann wrote:
>>> you are aware that with this we introduce just a extra platform we will get bugs
>>> for? We then not have just Mac/Qt but also Mac/Qt-X11 which is not even
>>> officially
>>> supported by Qt itself?
> 
> The KDE Community can provide bug support for whatever platforms it chooses.
> 
> In point of fact, its support for KDE 4 on OS X has not been at all strong in
> the last
> 5 or 6 years.  Partly this was because none of the following worked properly on
> OS X --- KCrash, DrKonqi and Help->Report a bug.  I know, I spent large parts of
> last year fixing them.
> 
> Marko Käning, Mario Fux and I revived this list as a place to discuss the
> issues.
> Thanks for being subscribed, Christoph and Samuel.
> 
> What we are trying to do here is to make support for Frameworks and KF5 better,
> this time around, that is if we ever get to implement them on Apple OS X and if
> we
> have not already lost any user base that KDE products have on Apple OS X.
> 
> We are also spending some time on KDE 4 problems.
> 
> Regarding the topic at hand.  I think René has made an important breakthrough
> on the QStandardPaths issue and we should be thinking about how best to take
> advantage of that.
> 
> A few hours ago, Christoph wrote:
>> Isn't this really all going in the completely wrong direction?
>> I thought we want to have frameworks that work as native on the different
>> operating systems as qt.
> 
> The KDE and Apple OS X environments have quite different design approaches
> with regards to applications.  A simple mapping of XDG directories onto "native"
> Apple OS X directories is not going to cut it in the long run.  Why not?
> 
> KDE and its Frameworks and KF5 successors EMBRACE file-sharing between
> applications, utilities and libraries.  Any GUI app I write for KDE has to have
> a ui.rc
> file and a .desktop file.  These have to be installed, not in an Apple OS X
> bundle,
> but in locations where libraries and utilities written by KDE core developers
> can
> find them, easily and _quickly_.
Actually, I here already disagree.
At least some KDE application developers like me or the Krita team want is to have self contained installers/bundles,
as that is the normal way to go there.

And it is not true, that all frameworks require globally installed files. I patched
KXMLGui to not require any UI file installed, itself it needs no longer any global files either.
The plugin mechanism of KDE was rewritten to not require .desktop files either, but
just have the plugins dir in the right place.

KConfig will have that fallback soon, too, to even allow preshipped default configs like in kate
without global stuff:

https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/125598/

KIO is still a challenge, that is true.

I understand that for KDE 4 it was necessary to treat Mac just like a other kind of
BSD, but I think for frameworks we shall aim to make them usable for people wanting to
create bundles and not going the MacPorts route.

Please read:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/2015-October/027673.html

And yes, without any black magic and any Qt patches, you can have working applications:

http://kate-editor.org/2015/10/14/kate-on-mac-hidpi/

You need nothing to work on Kate beside XCode, Qt + CMake (and yeah, gettext).
All other stuff is just the ECM + frameworks.
Nothing else above what is shipped with a normal Mac.

The only real problem with that ATM is broken KIO without dbus, patch here:

https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/125638/

and that I need to install the icons in the right locations.

And yeah, I think a lot more stuff is broken for sure and still we would need some
"deploy-qt" like tool to bundle all the libs inside the application bundle.

And no, I don't want to make life for MacPorts/Fink/Homebrew/... harder,
I am happy that people fix stuff for that things, too, but I don't see that as the goal
we had for the Frameworks 5 initiative.

We wanted to make them attractive for non-KDE applications & developers.
For Windows & Mac that means for me, they must be usable with stock Qt and without any
non-os native requirements ;=)

Greetings
Christoph

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