[KDE/Mac] Developing KDE on Mac

[Mike McQuaid]

On 13 Aug 2010, at 15:18, O wrote:
> Speaking as an ex-macports packager, I have to say it takes
> practically no extra effort to push patches upstream. I email them to
> a dev list and the developers either accept it or not. Therein lies
> the rub however. If the patch is "poor" it won't be accepted and
> unless I get help I'm not going to try to fix it as it works for me.
> "Extra effort" on my part would be learning (more of) a programming
> language on my time, which AFAIC is a no-go (some will, some won't).
> However, there are actual programmers who do use both
> kde-mac/fink/macports/homebrew.
> If they would take a look at the patches and fix the hacks the
> packagers put in (or work with them on fixing them) this seems
> something which would be worth doing. I'm just speaking personally on
> what would work for me though ...

That all sounds fair enough to me. The problem I have is that they don't get emailed to this list and that this list is practically dead. I'm also guilty of doing OSX things without telling anyone on the list, blogging about them or anything other than telling Till over Jabber.

> I'll hold my tongue.

Yes, point taken. However, it's much easier to get patches into KDE, they don't just get ignored on a bugtracker for years.

> I recommended the package manager to a relatively techie windows
> friend of mine to install amarok. He never got it working. If it's not
> using the native installer framework of the system (or something far
> better/intuitive) I think it's going to fail.

I'm not surprised. 

>> I think a reasonable intermediate step would be to have a DMG which installed the basic dependencies for KDE applications (e.g. D-Bus, Qt, KDELibs, KDESupport) and then .app bundles for individual applications.
> Which is a > 1 man job.

Certainly a >1 man in his spare time job. If anyone had paid me, this would be done. There's growing talk that this could happen.

> As of Camp KDE 2009 the instructions on using CPack for Mac OS X,
> whether in book form, or online documentation sucked (which is to say
> I couldn't find out how to make it do what I wanted it to do on the
> mac). Has this improved?
> 
> What I was attempting btw was
> 1. Compile program A.
> 2. Have certain files from program A relocated within the .app bundle
> 3. Make pkg.
> 
> #2 proved problematic.
> 
> Now while I believe it is possible, as others have claimed to do it, I
> have yet to see step by step instructions on how to do so.

CPack = awesome software, terrible, terrible documentation.

The best example, in my humble opinion, of doing this nicely now is actually looking at the code of other projects doing it. For example, Charm, a project we have at work, which is on gitorious. I've just added all the CPack support for Mac and Windows and added automatic compile-time dependency resolution.

Check the code out here:
http://gitorious.org/charm/charm/blobs/master/CMakeLists.txt#line131
http://gitorious.org/charm/charm/blobs/master/Charm/CMakeLists.txt#line178

I'm also fairly familiar with the CPack codebase and have a good handle of what it is and isn't capable of so feel free to ask me about this stuff.

--
Cheers,
Mike McQuaid
http://mikemcquaid.com