[KDE/Mac] KMyMoney, KCrash and more on KF5

[Ian Wadham]

Hi René,

On 23/08/2014, at 7:34 PM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> For now I'm staying away from trying to build KF5 on OS X ...
> 
> On Aug 23, 2014, at 11:09, Marko Käning wrote:
>> 
>> Since the discussion about placement of DrKonqi [2] lead to the decision to put it into
>> plasma-workspace we now DO HAVE A PROBLEM for KF5 on OSX, as we won’t ever build plasma-workspace!
>> 
>> Any ideas how to tackle this? Looks like we need a light-weight version of plasma-workspace
>> which doesn’t require X11 but including DrKonqi, or suggest to move DrKonqi someplace else??
> 
> I don't know exactly how kde4-workspace maps to plasma-workspace, but I have managed to build part of the former on OS X. I presume that shouldn't be impossible with plasma-workspace too.

Dr Konqi is in kde-runtime in KDE 4.  I believe KF5 is abolishing kde-runtime.

> That said, don't we always have the possibility to deactivate the whole DrKonqi feature, and just let OS X present its own crash dialog?

Not really.  Dr K transmits bug reports to bugs.kde.org in the format and with the information
KDE developers require.  Emails are then sent to the appropriate KDE maintainer and replies
to the user who reported the bug.

Dr K also engages in a dialog which solicits as much info as possible from the user.  It was
written to overcome the continual problem of crash reports that did not contain enough info.

Dr K has never worked on OS X, as far as I am aware.  Consequently crashes of KDE apps
have not been being reported by OS X users.  The result has been annoyance at the OS X
end and a feeling of satisfaction with a job well done at the KDE end.

> My experience with DrKonqi is less than luke warm even on Linux, so if it were me I'd not spend hours and hours trying to get it to work on OS X as it works on Linux.

I am working on it to make KDE developers aware of the real situation on Apple OS X.
Unfortunately, Dr K is badly designed IMHO.  As a sometime writer, designer and
software support guy for O/S and real-time code, I can say that crashes need to be
dealt with in the simplest possible fashion, before anything else goes wrong.  Save
what you can, get out and analyse later...

Instead, Dr K, which should be just another GUI app that accesses a website, is about
as complex and tightly bound in its dependencies as it can be, or so I am finding.  In
KDE 4 there is no alternative to getting it "to work on OS X as it works on Linux".  But
if I do not get some support from KDE core developers soon, I will simply give up.

In KF 5, maybe it will get radically simplified and re-written, but I do not see anyone
rushing forward to do that…

> Another thought: I read things about KF5 support for Wayland and how that would (eventually?) ease the support for other platforms, so I'm a bit amazed to see Marko talking about X11 dependencies in plasma-workspace?

Yeah, that does seem odd.  I thought X11 had gone the way of the dodo in KDE.
All that to-ing and fro-ing between the app and the server carries a lot of overhead.

Cheers, Ian W.