[KDE/Mac] Hi (from Kolab Client "Team", part of)

[Mike McQuaid]

On 19 Aug 2010, at 11:52, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> Dear fellow KDE people and friends of Free Software on Mac,
> I am writing to make Kontact with you!
> 
> You know the KDE Application "Kontact". :)
> It is also a nice groupware client, especially for the Kolab Groupware 
> Solution (www.kolab.org). Many people within the KDEPIM community, that does 
> Kontact, also worked on getting it to be a good Kolab Client.
> 
> My company (Intevation) and other companies (like KDAB and g10code)
> were in the good situation of getting contracted to do some work in this area
> over the last years and be able to fully work as part of the respective 
> communities. This was very helpful to improve of Kontact overall.
> We organised the KDE meeting with the longes track record
> (8 consecutive years - longer than Akademy), and our teams helped
> a lot to port Kontact and KDE4 towards Windows and now towards Akonadi.
> 
> In 2008 we did a first Kontact in the Mac attempt in the now 
> discontinued "Enterprise 4" branch. We could push the envelop only a little 
> bit, because the commercial (*) interest for Kontact on Mac had been low
> in these times. Hopefully we can change that for the future, 
> but we are all small companies and owner run, so there is no 
> venture capital for a heavy investment or something similiar 
> we all might dream of. ;)
> 
> Because we aimed at doing a beta first and we had to solve the rebuild and 
> source delivery problems, we wanted to contribute
> to one of the already ongoing packaging efforts for Mac OS X.
> After some initial analysis by Emanuel we had chosen MacPorts.
> I think Emanuel also is writing on one of the MacPorts lists.
> 
> Infos about our efforts here and there: 
>  http://wiki.kolab.org/index.php/Kontact_for_MacOS_(beta-huge-debug)
>  http://files.kolab.org/macports/
> 
> So our current aim is to get a fresh Kontact enterprise5 - which is currently
> in early beta - to build and delivered reliably with MacPorts.
> Note that the subteam of KDEPIM doing this, currently works with mini-branches
> we call tags, which we try to do once a week. Our branches moved to use the 
> new KDE SC 4.5 libs which was the last significant change, and we need to fix 
> the Mac build as one of the consequences, which is the practical next step.
> 
> So Paul, Emanuel and Till are part of "our gang" in trying to get Kontact E5
> working and delivered for Mac OS X.This includes a bunch of libraries,
> thus a large part of KDE. Needless to say this also builds on top of your 
> efforts and we are grateful for it. Let us do more together and get KDE 
> Applications to become great and well known for the Mac!

It's cool that there is a commercial effort ongoing on this front and I'd like to help here if I can.

Did you manage to read the packaging discussion thread (titled "Developing KDE on Mac")? I raised some concerns there that I'd like to raise with you:

- There's a few people doing work on this but we're all taking different approaches and not discussing it on the mailing list. Specifically, you and Sjors seem to have the same approach but one of you is using Macports and the other Fink.

- There are too many patches in Macports/Fink that really should be upstream in trunk and the release branches.

- As a result of the patching, KDE on Mac basically doesn't work without using these patches. This seems a bad situation to me and I think that the port has stagnated somewhat due to this.

- Most non-technical OSX users expect a .app bundle distributed in a .dmg and using Sparkle for updates. CPack provides the capability for fixing up the dependencies in a .app bundle and creating a DMG.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the above and if you think you will be able to address any of these concerns.

Thanks for your work, I'm glad people are working on this :)

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