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

[Ian Wadham]

Hello Mario,

On 23/08/2014, at 10:14 PM, Mario Fux wrote:
> Am Samstag, 23. August 2014, 11.09:57 schrieb Marko Käning:

I guess by now you have seen my replies to Marko and René.

>> 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!
> 
> Strange. But that means KDE Windows has in the end the same problem.

So do Gnome and other Linux-based desktops.  The problem will come home
to roost at the KDE end, i.e. inadequate crash reports from every platform except
Plasma.

I hope the KDE developers will not regard the absence of such reports with deep
satisfaction, believing that they "got things right" on every non-Plasma platform… :-)
The OS X platform has been the victim of that delusion for years already… :-)

> But to  cite Kevin from the email in [2]:
> "If not available then kcrash could provide a default very basic one."
> 
> Wouldn't this be possible for the native Mac crash handler?

And how would KDE developers react to receiving such a report?  The whole
Dr Konqi thrust is aimed at getting the maximum information from users in the
form that KDE developers need to see it.  Otherwise, progress is delayed.

The only crash report the MacPorts developers were ever able to get for the
meinproc4 crashes was a native one and AFAIK nobody from KDE read it.
That whole bug report is still open after several years.

> Otherwise we'd need to ask if it's possible to move DrKonqi back to KF5. I'll 
> try to ask the KDE Windows guys about their opinion.

I would say that it should be -mandatory- to move it, along with any other items
that most KDE apps need on every platform, such as KHelpCenter.

Furthermore, it is important to free those things of dependencies on KDE core
processes and libraries that might not exist on other platforms.  They need to be
"Frameworkized".

But such work is not "sexy" and tends to get swept under the carpet unless there
is strong professional leadership to make it happen.  See the first few posts on
reference [2].  Those posts are now 4 months old and AFAIK nothing further has
been done.

Dr K and others should not be left in the "too hard basket" and then get a hasty
patch-up job before some future KF 5 release.  They are apps that need to be
ported to Frameworks, just like many others.  And they should be among the
FIRST to be ported, because other apps depend on them, as does future KF 5
support, from the first release onwards.

>> 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 think that building and using plasma-workspace on Mac is the solution. 
> If that'd be necessary there is something really broken.

I agree wholeheartedly with you, Mario.  Let's do something about it.

Cheers, Ian W.

> Plasma-workspace is a workspace and thus not thought for Windows or Mac OS X
> and the work to port it  to Wayland just started.
>> 
>> [1]
>> http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/2014-August/018142.html
>> [2]
>> http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/2014-April/014384.html