[Kde-games-devel] Freeze in 6 weeks

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Albert,

On 28/01/2015, at 9:58 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Dimarts, 27 de gener de 2015, a les 15:53:32, Ian Wadham va escriure:
>>> I mean are we expecting to save and load the save games over the
>>> network or something that would require kio?
>> 
>> No, not in KMahjongg.  But with some games, who knows?  Do KSudoku
>> and Palapeli players want to exchange puzzles over the Internet?  Or use
>> remote locations to save their games?
>> 
>> Or are those features there because network-transparent I/O was fashionable
>> with KDE Games programmers a few years ago?… ;-)  It is not that hard to
>> save a file locally and then move it to a remote site… or attach it to an
>> email...
> 
> This is non-sense, why remove network-transparency?


> What you should do is fix KF5 on Mac OSX to work instead of removing
> features from apps.

The world does not owe KF5 a living, neither do I.

Here is how it is and how it will be, Albert.

The KDE-Mac group and MacPorts developers are now able to run KDE 4
apps, utilities and libraries reasonably well on the Apple OS X platform. We
can do this without having to have kdeinit4, klauncher4 and kded4 running
all the time.

A year ago there were many failing KDE 4 applications on Apple OS X and
it was impossible to get out a crash report, due to failures in KCrash and Dr
Konqi.  Most of the problems have been in KDE and Qt libraries, utilities and
background processes, rather than the apps themselves.  The KDE-Mac group
have fixed the worst things up, on their own, with very little help from the KDE
core developers, who said they were too busy developing Frameworks and KF5.
Some KDE developers were actually hostile, with comments like "Screw OS X".

Thanks to Marko, we now have a working CI for Frameworks and KF5 software
on Apple OS X.  So code can receive some minimal testing now, before landing
at MacPorts, Homebrew or Fink --- as opposed to zero testing of Apple portability
code in KDE 4 software.

We also expect that the KDE Community will acquire some Apple hardware or
virtual installations on which KDE developers can test and diagnose issues,
new features and bugs --- as was discussed early last year on kde-devel.

We do not yet have widespread availability of Qt 5, Frameworks and KF5 on
Apple OS X systems, but it is coming.

When we have that, the KDE Community may expect to start receiving bug
reports on Frameworks and KF5 software as implemented on Apple OS X.
And we will expect those reports to be addressed.  No more excuses about
no longer releasing the software or being too busy on Frameworks and KF5.

The KDE-Mac group and the MacPorts developers can help with narrowing
down and diagnosing problems.  We may even suggest a patch sometimes,
but the KF5 and Frameworks developers must stand behind their own products
and be prepared to fix them themselves.

If they do not, and if the products contain too many problems, I for one will
be recommending not to release them on MacPorts and to stick with the
KDE 4 versions.

You must realise, Albert, that MacPorts provides about 20,000 pieces of
FOSS software on a wide range of hardware and OS X versions.  The apps,
utilities and libraries that come from the KDE Community are but a drop
in the bucket.  OTOH, if KDE software can succeed on Apple OS X, there
is a wide new ocean for the KDE Community to explore… :-)

All the best, Ian W.

P.S. Here is a small foretaste of KF5 bug reports from Apple OS X.  KCalc's
        layout is really messed up.  Looks pretty bad, huh?  We think it is due
        to some kind of mis-communication between Qt5 and KF5 libraries.
        The bug also exists in KCalc on Qt4 and KDE 4.
        https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339670#c19

P.P.S. I have not seen anything like that in KDE Games apps, except in
       KFileDialog, where buttons can overlap text a bit.  So don't panic… :-)