[KDE/Mac] How can I change one piece of code in a MacPorts installation?

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

For a few weeks now I have been beating my head against the
problem of getting KCrash to use a socket to ask kdeinit4 to
start Dr Konqi and report a crash.  There is also a problem
later on when Dr Konqi wants to ask klauncher to run an app
to transmit the completed crash-report to bugs.kde.org.

The trouble is that the kdeinit4 and klauncher versions from MacPorts
are running all the time in my MacBook and they expect sockets
to be connected via ~/Library/Preferences/KDE, KDE's normal
"home" directory, but my test setup uses a different directory (to
protect other important things I have in the normal KDE "home").

I have tried shutting down kdeinit4 and klauncher and then starting
my own test versions, which do create sockets in my test $KDEHOME,
but then KCrash will not "connect" to those sockets.

What I do not know is whether I am doing something wrong or
whether perhaps connecting to kdeinit4 via sockets has -never-
worked in Apple OS X (many other KDE things have not … ;-)).

I have kdelibs4 @4.12.5_3 (active) installed, but that version
contains the KCrash bug that prevents KCrash from ever getting
to the point where it decides to try and run Dr Konqi, i.e. KCrash
itself crashes before it gets that far.

What I am wondering is whether there is some way I could edit
the KCrash source-code, rebuild kdeui library or the whole of
kdelibs4 and then install it down in MacPorts (/opt/local)?

I only need to change a couple of source-code lines.  Then I could
see on the system log whether KCrash can in fact get kdeinit4 to start
up Dr Konqi in an Apple OS X environment.

If it can, it's back to the drawing-board for me.

If it cannot, we have a new KDE portability problem on Apple OS X… ;-)

Back in the day I would have patched the binary file for kdeui.dylib,
but I gather that is well nigh impossible with modern technology … :-)

Cheers, Ian W.