[KDE/Mac] Bug reporting in KDE on Apple OS X

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 30 June 2014 Jun 21:44:56 Ian Wadham wrote:

> I am thinking of bypassing the need for kded4 in Dr Konqi at least,
> otherwise we cannot be sure Dr Konqi will run properly after a crash
> and make it possible to report KDE bugs from Apple platforms.

Well, my problem here is that Dr Konqui is most useful if you're also shipping debug symbols. For Krita, that's not something I intend to do, so I might actually extend the use of Google Breakpad -- we already do that on Windows.

> DBus we are comfortable with in MacPorts.
> 
> Did you see my post on kde-devel re kded4?  Do you know the answers
> to my questions?  So far no response… :-{

When I was focusing on Windows I had the same problem with kded4, and I just remove it. That broke Dr Konqui, but then, on Windows that wasn't all that useful anyway. I had to make a couple of really tough decisions and I find I'm in the same position now on OSX: I want to make a package of Krita that conforms to what the regular users expect, so I just cannot have any daemon running. I cannot even have kbuildsycoca4 run after installation, because that's not what Mac users expect.

So right now I'm working on an alternative way of locating and loading plugins. Good exercise, I guess, for the Qt5 port. What I don't get, yet, is the difference between running "bla.app/Contents/MacOS/bla" and "open bla.app"...

> 
> > This is the repo I use:
> > 
> > git://anongit.kde.org/clones/kdelibs/rempt/kdelibs-stripped.git
> > 
> > branch: stripped
> 
> I cloned that and had a look, but found only branch "master".  However
> there are certainly hundreds and thousands of diffs.

http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=clones%2Fkdelibs%2Frempt%2Fkdelibs-stripped.git&a=shortlog&h=42379c18b2923a94db337a7adb2c060304b63a82

I've also noticed a weird bug in kservice, where the type of the variant for custom desktop file keys isn't inferred correctly. That's to say service->property("X-KDE-bla") return nothing unless you specifiy the type like this: service->property("X-KDE-bla", QVariant::StringList)

> 
> > It also removes a host of other things I don't  need for krita, so it isn't immediately reusable.
> > For instance, no plasma, no kparts, ssl is hacked out…
> 
> I think we need some "pruning" of KDE in MacPorts, but I do not have
> much idea what as yet.  It would help if KDE 4 had some architecture
> documentation, but I have never been able to find any.  And I have
> never really understood what KParts are or why we need them.

well, kparts were originally KDE's answer to Microsoft's OLE architecture. They were meant to build compound documents -- so you'd have a text document kpart that would embed a spreadsheet document kpart. That sort of extended into a generic document + gui embeddable object thing. We no longer use it in Calligra, even though it was originally designed for KOffice by Reginald Stadlbauer. There is a big disadvantage to kparts in that it ties together the qwidget-based gui and the document: load the document and you get the gui with it.

> 
> I gather you must have an Apple machine for testing.  Are you able to
> help us?

Yes, I've got a small and slow macmini. I'm not sure I dare install macports on it, though, because I'm afraid it might interfere with my regular builds.

> 
> I am a KDE developer working exclusively on Apple OS X, but until
> now only in KDE Games.  As you may know, I am also rather old, but
> I had a lot of experience in OS, real-time and UNIX systems work back
> in the day.  I am surprised at how quickly I am picking up on core KDE
> issues.  I suppose it's like riding a bike: you never forget… :-)
> 

:-)

> > But I'm really close to fixing up a dmg of krita, I think, I basically only have to hack macdeployqt to also deploy kde plugins and their libraries. This is based on building all the dependencies with a set of external cmake projects, I'm not using macports or homebrew or fink here.
> 
> Great !!!   Will you put Krita on the App Store?  Heh, heh… ;-)
> 

If the rest of the krita community is fine with that, I might actually do that. I've also created the Krita Foundation to fund Krita development, so we've got a full-time developer on Krita now, and I would like to extend that.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl