[KDE/Mac] kdesrc-build

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Jeremy,

And welcome to our list.

On 26/11/2014, at 8:21 AM, Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> I appreciate the effort that has gone into getting kde stuff in mac ports and so on. I spent a bit of time today on #kde-mac on irc discussing with Marko about the mac setup and how to build qt5/kf5 based applications on a mac vm I finally got to work here (until I can at some time get a real mac) to test some applications I maintain in kde (and a few frameworks themselves).

Thank you very much for your interest, Jeremy.

> I was originally naive and from previous mails here thought I could use kdesrc-build as is to build on mac since it's unix-based. From reading https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/base/osx-patches/repository/revisions/master/entry/KDEMacPortsTools/README_FIRST it seems it's not that straightforward.

It's straightforward enough. All the complexities are handled by scripts and aliases,
but I have only used it on KDE 4. I think the CMake options would have to be quite
different for Qt5/KF5/Frameworks. Most of the extra options are to force CMake to
build in MacPorts (Open Source) versions of common utilities and libraries and
override the ones that Apple OS X has in /usr. Another problem might be that my
kdesrc-build setup "borrows" quite a lot of already-built KDE/Qt components from
MacPorts, including Qt 4 itself, and of course that would not work with KF5.

> Also I finally got xcode to download and install on the mavericks vm (took a long time here for some reason) and tried with MacPorts versions of cmake and git to run kdesrc-build myself, but it complained that it couldn't create /home/jeremywhiting which already exists, so that confuses me too.

You need also to specifically request the command-line utilities, which are no
longer bundled with Xcode.

> Anyway here are my main questions after all that rambling:
> 
> 1. Can we improve kdesrc-build itself or it's include files to get it to build on mac without these additional steps? (I was thinking maybe another include file within kdesrc-build's sources like kf5-applications-include or whatnot to set additional mac only options)

I emailed with Michael Pyne (author of kdesrc-build) about that, but I think he
was busy elsewhere and not too keen on the idea anyway.

> 2. What are the major barriers, technical and/or organizational, that prevent newcomers from getting, building, and contributing fixes to kde on mac ? I think I remember a link to a wiki of technical issues, but I'm also interested in organizational issues. If we can solve some/most of these we could get many more hands helping with this work.
> 
> thanks,
> Jeremy
> 
> P.S. My main reason for initially setting up a mac vm is to build/run applications and fix issues on this platform that don't appear on other platforms. CI is interesting to me, but not as much as individual developers building, running, and bugfixing on this platform.

It certainly does give you a different perspective… :-)  I have been developing and
maintaining KDE games on OS X and MacPorts for about 3 years.

Cheers, Ian W.