[KDE/Mac] Developing KDE on Mac

[Mike McQuaid]

On 18 Aug 2010, at 19:46, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:

> 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.

Nice work! Macdeployqt is great and works well, it's just doesn't help with KDE applications, which is one of the reasons I've used CPack for Charm, as a test-bed for the KDE stuff.

> 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.

Yep, I agree that it's a shame. My work with CPack and KDELibs should be able to help you here.

Out of interest, do you require D-Bus for KDELibs?

I hope to be able to fix your exact case study: get the core libraries packaging support so it's easy for other developers to release .app bundles of their own applications.

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