[KDE/Mac] Giving up on kdeinit4 and friends

[Ian Wadham]

Hi René,

On 29/08/2014, at 9:53 PM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Aug 29, 2014, at 11:32, Mario Fux wrote:
> 
>>> OS X into some sort of working shape that is independent of KDE
>>> core processes and non-portable objects like KCookieJar.
> 
> What's non-portable in kcookiejar? It seems to work just fine for me - provided kded4 is running. Maybe it ought to receive a Mac backend just like kwallet?

More likely I'll give Dr Konqi a new backend, to use the new cookie-less
interfaces to Bugzilla software.  BTW I think there may be some Qt 4/5
support for portable cookie jars.  There are certainly some Qt classes
with names like that.

Re kded4, I tried running it from the kde4 application bundle and guess
what, it also started kdeinit4 and klauncher, but then there was no way
of stopping them… :-)  They kept on automatically re-starting after being
killed.  Yeah, I know, kill -9… ;-)

There is a utility called kdeinit4_shutdown, but it fails on Apple OS X,
would you believe, because it gets the socket name wrong… :-)
Another huge bug in kdeinit4 and friends.

>> I still think it's important to see that first kdeinit(4) is an open question 
>> even for the kdelibs/KF5 people. And second feature development for kdelibs4 
>> ended years ago and eventhough there is still bugfixing done for kdelibs4 most 
>> of the power goes into KDE Frameworks 5 as the successor of kdelibs4. And 
>> let's not forget that there is not a huge amount of manpower of KF5 as well...
> 
> What everyone also needs to realise is that with the current state of things, KDE development on Mac has to take place in KDE 4 for the vast majority. Also, we don't have the (man)power of distribution groups ([K]Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSUSE, ...) behind us who can provide playgrounds like the Neon5 project.

Well said, René!

> At the same time, the organisation/implementation of these mailing lists don't help integration, and rather favour the them vs. us spirit that Mario clearly despises so much. At the same time, I for one am not looking towards joining yet another mailing list just in order to get feedback (e.g. on things I cross-posted) from people on kde-devel - and the forums aren't that ... reactive.
> I haven't tried IRC yet, though - have you, Ian? (In fact, I did for some Calligra/Krita things I came across: worked quite well.)

I think IRC would be better for some things, but my timezone makes it
impractical for me… Australia, UTC +10 to 11.
> 
>> of KDE in the same way as everybody else. But we can't expect from people that 
>> work hard on KF5 on Linux and don't know anything about Mac OS X to help us. 
> 
> Not for things that are really specific to OS X, but we have our own resources for that. What we do need help with is the KDE internals, knowing how they're supposed to work, and how we might be able to work around incompatibilities with the way things are done on OS X. Remember, we're not reimplementing KDE from scratch. We're trying to get the existing code to work.

Well said, again.

Cheers, Ian W.