[KDE/Mac] Repository for patches to fix KDE Problems on OS X

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

On 27/06/2014, at 4:07 AM, Marko Käning wrote:
> BTW, Ian, from your DrKonqi patches I conclude that any KDE application
> should depend on kde-runtime, if the user should be enabled to generate
> backtraces by DrKonqi that is!
> 
> On MacPorts most ports seem not to include that dependency:

That's an interesting and far-reaching observation, Marko.

I have been developing KDE apps on MacPorts for about three years now
and had always assumed that Dr Konqi was automatically on the dependency
list for KDE apps.  It *is* so in a Linux desktop.  Dr Konqi kept failing to run
properly whenever my tests would crash and was a long-running source
of annoyance for me.

But now I find:
    Tara:~>port rdependents kde4-runtime
    The following ports are dependent on kde4-runtime:
      kde4-baseapps
      kmymoney4
And neither kde4-baseapps nor kde4-runtime are on my "requested"
list, so it must have been good old kmymoney4 that has been getting
me Dr Konqi all along … :-)

Which raises the question of what do Macports users usually see when
a KDE app crashes?  An Apple OS X backtrace?  Sudden death followed
by mysterious disappearance into that great bit-bucket in the sky?  An
invitation to tell Apple all about it? … ;-)

Qt, KDE libraries and some KDE apps are programmed to crash (using
Qt's ASSERT macro) whenever they reach an illogical situation or even
when an app exceeds the boundaries of an array or list.  I don't entirely
agree with that philosophy, but that is how things are.

That is why KDE developers often ask for a backtrace when you report
a bug on bugs.kde.org.  They need to know the exact spot where the
problem arose.  And it is why I gave priority to investigating problems
with Dr Konqi and KCrash (which is part of kdelibs4).

When a KDE app crashes, it is supposed to run Dr Konqi and there is
a button in Dr K to get a backtrace, if you are a developer.  There is also a
bug-reporting dialog in Dr Konqi that prompts an end-user for details of
how the crash occurred and automatically raises a report on bugs.kde.org,
appending the backtrace details.

I got this entire sequence to work a few days ago.  See
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336075#c3 … :-) and I now
have to find out how to make it work every time.  Ditto for the Help->
Report Bug… menu item in every KDE app.  I got it to work once,
but in that case I do not really know why or what I did right… :-(

Re making kde4-runtime an automatic dependency of every KDE
app in MacPorts, that would be an overkill IMHO.  It *is* a dependency
in a KDE desktop on Linux, but there is a lot of stuff in it that would be
irrelevant in Apple OS X, see the list in:
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-runtime/repository

I need to at least finish working on getting the KDE bug dialogs to
run and then we could patch kdelibs4 and kde4-runtime in MacPorts.
Maybe, as a quick fix, we could then declare kde4-runtime as a
dependency of all KDE apps, depending on what comes out of my
further investigations and what Nicolas and Bradley think.

All the best, Ian W.