[KDE/Mac] Developing KDE on Mac

[Mike McQuaid]

On 13 Aug 2010, at 22:21, John Layt wrote:

> Having read all the thread so far, and last night looked at the MacPorts patches and wondered "Why???" here's my thoughts as a 'core' KDE developer.

> If we claim to support a platform, then the KDE modules should build and run out of the box on that platform, no extra patches required.  For the Mac project to eventually make that claim means _all_ patches need to be in mainline, there should never be patches required by MacPorts or Fink.  People shouldn't have to go looking in other repositories just to get things to build and run, svn.kde.org is the canonical source.  This may mean some parts of KDE are just not built or certain features are disabled until such time as a 'good-enough' solution is coded, but release branch should always build and run.  If a crude hack is required short-term, then so be it so long as we know there's a more correct solution coming and the hack is not actually causing harm.  Patches in Macports/Fink are OK as a short term fix or experiment, but should never be seen as a long-term or permanent solution for anything.

Completely agree.

> This is as much about visibility as anything, if something is ifdef'ed out and marked as not working on Mac, then it is more likely the maintainer (or any other interested party with the ability to do so) will pay attention and help fix the issue.

> Reviewboard now makes submitting patches even easier to do, and really easy to track what has been accepted and merged and what still needs work.
> I would suggest your first course of action would be to progressively feed all the outstanding patches into mainline.

> As for packaging, I'll leave that to you the platform experts to sort out, but personally I do agree with the general principle that we should at least appear to the user to be using the standard platform installation method they are most familiar with, or failing that the simplest method possible.  The Windows installer is a great tool, but far too complex for the average user.  My other point is telling people to wait 48 hours while MacPorts/Fink compiles all the dependencies is just a no-go, binary installs are the only option.

Agreed here too, as mentioned earlier, doing it the native way takes longer but gives a nicer interface to the user.

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