[kde-freebsd] KDE4 Status and Support

[Danny Pansters]

On Monday 05 November 2007 17:15:32 Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> David Naylor schrieb:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I was wondering what condition KDE4 is in regards to FreeBSD.  Does it
> > compile and run
>
> Parts of it compile, parts of it run.

A me-too of sorts: a month or so ago I tried building it from homegrown ports, 
that is kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, kdepimlibs, using the then-available 
snapshots. As Adrian says, the workspace starts but gets stuck in an endless 
knotify loop. It seems like the dbus services are not started or registered 
properly, e.g. nepomuk.

From within kde3, some stuff would run, like dolphin (until it wants to use 
nepomuk).

I mostly had to do many s/<qmyheader>/<QMyHeader>/. That's with qt3/kde3 
installed. A little symlink spaghetti needed as well, but not unmanagable, to 
get it to install like that. Well, I also made a startk and kinitrc with 
obvious minimal changes to the originals, so that I could startx (kde3) and 
startk (kde4).

But alas, the workspace never worked... If we get some progress there I'd be 
happy to go back and try again, and maybe do some more rudimentary ports.

Whether it's desirable or not, we're going to have a timeframe where the users 
will want both kde3 (apps) and kde4 (apps) working alongside.

> > , also have some ports been written for some of the
> > KDE4 packages.
>
> No.
>
> > I have noticed a trend to break up these big
> > monolithic packages into smaller units (openSuse in particular have
> > done this for KDE4 and we have done it for Xorg 7.3 in ports), will
> > KDE4 in ports be following suite?
>
> openSuse is an rpm-based distribution and because of this its packagers
> are in the lucky position to be able to simply build the monolithic
> source tarballs (over and over if necessary) and then put the resulting
> binaries into different rpms. Since FreeBSD users expect to be able to
> build ports from source, the source distribution must be organized in a
> way that minimizes compile-time dependencies within the source
> distribution packages. It would be nice if it could be done. I don't
> know yet if it really can be done. Right now, I don't even know if KDE4,
> whatever the final shape of the ports, will be able to coexist with KDE3.

It should and can be I think.

>
> > Lastly is there anyway I (and anyone else) can help with the effort of
> > getting KDE4 to FreeBSD.
>
> Absolutely: Build the betas, build from SVN and if something doesn't
> work, assume its a bug and try to fix it. If you have no idea how to fix
> it, send mail to this list, the appropriate kde-devel lists, or drop by
> the kde-freebsd IRC channel.
>
> Cheers,

Cheers,

Dan