[KDE/Mac] Getting applications to run

[Marko Käning]

Hi René,

On 18 Dec 2014, at 12:13 , René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nothing. Most of all you didn't miss my slip-up; it was too early for me.

:)


> 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”):

Well, I still believe, that the minimal CI patch which we’ll introduce should
try to obey to Qt’s demand for leaving Apple’s standard locations untouched.


> ~/.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).

And if we on MacPorts decide to move this to something like the above, we can
still do by changing the configuration in the new KF5 port group.


> 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).

Yes, this directory hiding is a good point, but for the standard user it is
indeed not needed to see everything hidden under the hood.


> 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.

Hmmm…


> 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.

I IRCed with Jeremy last night and we discussed how to strip down the CI patch
to something which is sufficient for a KDE CI system, so that we don’t need to
introduce ALL the XDG env variables.


> Good luck with that ... ;)

Thanks. :)


Greets,
Marko