[KDE/Mac] Getting applications to run

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday December 18 2014 08:01:33 Marko Käning wrote:

Hi Marko (et al)

> that they modify?
> 
> I thought that "/Library/Application Support” would be for readonly data and only
> “~/Library/Application Support” should be used for writeable data…

You're absolutely right.

> What am I missing?

Nothing. Most of all you didn't miss my slip-up; it was too early for me.


> > Why can't we use the osx path for runtime stuff (I would guess it would
> > mostly be used for sockets and temporary files, no ?)> 
> See above, herewith we do.
> 
> But hey, if "~/Library/Application Support” is actually the REAL Apple
> standard, we could use that as well, of course.
> 
> René and Ian, what do you think?

For starters, I think that it's a bad idea to pick a directory with a space in its name.
We *could* decide to put everything under a single directory in there, despite that space, just like we do now with ~/Library/Preferences/KDE.
Something like (using my customary "AppSupport" which is symlinked to "Application Support"):

~/.kde/share/config -> ~/Library/Preferences/KDE
~/.kde/share/{apps,icons,...} -> ~/Library/AppSupport/KDE/{apps,icons,...}

This already shows the issue: there's quite a few things under ~/.kde, and not all of it has a clearly defined function (and then there's ~/.cache and ~/.local that are also being used).

Add to that the fact that ~/Library is hidden by default by recent OS X versions, and that the Finder doesn't show ".dot" files and directories ... and you get the hunch that casual users won't ever notice what gets installed where (and neither KDE nor Mac applications make a habit of requiring the user to go in and tweak things manually in there).

IMHO, all that pleads to follow the KDE way of doing things. This has the added benefit that more savvy users -who are probably quite likely to install the KDE apps they also use on Linux- can find lowlevel stuff where they expect it.
On my own system, I quickly made a symlink to ~/Library/Preferences/KDE in ~/.kde, so that I don't have to 1) think and 2) type more when I want something in there. And as I mentioned earlier, that whole KDE directory has in fact been moved to a case-sensitive volume.

Which is something I think of as probably a very good thing to do, and distributing things around in places where they don't have a common root shared only with other KDE entries would make that quite a bit less easy.

> I do see Thiago’s point,
> that we need to make sure, that we can run all KF5 applications WITHOUT any
> patches being made on OSX!!! (This means the only way to do testing is to
> build the applications with a vanilla qt5 and without any modifications to
> neither config nor source files.)

If he really invited patches to be sent in that would give a point to this exercise, and we ought to follow up on that just to get the collaboration rolling.

> If that is not the case, the corresponding KF5 application’s build system is
> borked and needs some fixing (as you already have started to do). If we

Or ... Qt5's QSP philosophy on OS X is ... inadapted for KF5 on OS X in that it caters only to individual user applications and not with applications that are (somehow) part of a desktop, could perform administrative tasks, etc.
Most likely you'll find a bit of both ...

> and submitted to Digia quickly for inclusion in the next Qt5 release.

Good luck with that ... ;)

R.