[KDE/Mac] Developing KDE on Mac

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Wednesday, August 18, 2010, Benjamin Reed wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Mike McQuaid <mike at mikemcquaid.com> wrote:
> > As an example of my method, here's how to make a Qt application that
> > finds and installs all it's own dependencies in CMake:
> > http://gitorious.org/charm/charm/blobs/master/Charm/CMakeLists.txt#line22
> >8
> >
> > This lets "make package" build a droppable .app installer of this Qt
> > application on OSX. I could change one line and make it create .pkg
> > installers instead. The .dmg is 6.4MB and the installed .app is 20MB.
> > This somewhat destroys your claim that "bundling a Qt framework inside
> > the .app makes the .app grow by a few hundred MB".
> >
> > Patches/bugs are currently in the CMake bug tracker which, when fixed,
> > should make this almost a one-liner.

For my cross platform VMPK (Virtual MIDI piano keyboard), I distribute an 
universal .app bundle (intel+ppc,32bits) for Mac, including all required Qt4 
dependencies as private frameworks. It is a ~15Mb .zip package. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmpk/files/

It is built with qmake, and the dependencies gathered into the bundle by  
macdeployqt, without the help of CPack.
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/deployment-mac.html#the-mac-deployment-tool

I know that there are some happy Mac users of this program. Windows downloads 
outnumber Linux and Macs by thousands. The program is also available in some 
major Linux distros. Everybody seems to be glad with it.

> I'm obviously a supporter of Fink, being one of the core maintainers
> and all, but I think trying to package fink with a frontend would be a
> nightmare.  First, what do you do with people with existing Fink
> installs?  Upgrade their dependent binaries with new debs,
> potentially?  Make the KDE packages in somewhere other than /sw?
>
> I'd rather work on making CPack Do The Right Thing for all of KDE out
> of the box, which benefits other platforms as well.

KMid (www.kde.org/applications/multimedia/kmid/) is now a cross platform KDE 
application. I've done my best to support Windows and Mac OSX. The users of 
these operating systems may enjoy their native MIDI infrastructures and soft 
synths. No other external dependencies are needed, only kdelibs.

Well. I've received complains from a few Mac users, because they can't 
download a binary package, and it is not available neither from Fink nor  
Macports. The situation is not much better for Windows.

From my developer point of view, I am disappointed. My motivation to work in 
cross platform support for KDE is very low. So, I would gladly welcome any  
proposal to clean up all this mess.

Regards,
Pedro