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

[Ian Wadham]

Hi René,

On 22/07/2014, at 9:28 AM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Jul 21, 2014, at 10:28, Ian Wadham wrote:
>> At first sight, it looks as though KCrash has never been able to start
>> Dr Konqi by sending a message on a socket to kdeinit4.  I still get the
>> same "connect" error and it starts Dr K by forking it.  But I need to get
>> some more log messages into the code to prove exactly what is going
>> on down there…
> 
> DrKonqi *was* started on my system a couple of times (when playing with kmail, which has gone unstable as hell for me, all of a sudden). I also got a (part of the) backtrace, but things hung there. I presume because DrKonqi and gdb don't understand each other well enough on OS X, causing the former to hang waiting for the latter (on the main thread, so the whole UI freezes too...).
> Hope you'll find a fix for that too!

I have been seeing similar sporadic Dr Konqi behaviour for a few years
with Snow Leopard and then Lion.  There are fixes for pretty much all of it
in playground/base/osx-patches, 1 for KCrash, 3 for Dr K.  KCrash has two
goes at starting Dr K, first by asking kdeinit4 to do it (on a socket) and
then by directly forking and exec'ing Dr K.

GDB does not seem to be involved.  There is an option to start it from
Dr K, I believe, but mainly for use by KDE developers.  I have not tried
that option, because I do not use GDB in my KDE development work.

The socket is failing because KCrash and kdeinit4 compute different
names for the socket, in the Apple OS X version of their code, so --- no
communication.  It looks strongly as though kdeinit4 is setting up the
wrong name on Apple OS X and, since it is the server/listener, I doubt
if kdeinit4 has ever worked at starting core KDE apps on Apple OS X.

When I have developed and tested a patch for the socket stuff, I will
try to get all my patches for crash-handling reviewed by KDE core
developers.  I think most, if not all, of them are going to apply to
KDE Frameworks code on Apple OS X, as well as KDE 4.x.

Cheers, Ian W.