[KDE/Mac] A (non)success story of digiKam on OSX/MacPorts involving kde4-workspace and qtcurve

[Marko Käning]

Hi Nicos, René, and all MacPorts, MacPorts/KDE and KDE devs,

just recently we had a case of NEW - 75 years old - MacPorts user (WITHOUT any
technical background) who came to MacPorts because he’d heard about digiKam and
wanted to test it. On the project's website he learnt that one should install
MacPorts in order to be able to install KDE4 and digiKam on top of it on his
Macbook running Yosemite...

So he began his courageous endeavour without any fear! I have to say, I admired
his stamina, because he went through great lengths to get MacPorts and its
dependencies (Xcode, Command Line Tools, Java, etc.) installed…

He succeeded with everything, thanks to help from others, but after that had
problems with themes in digikam which he filed a ticket for [1].

Finally SUCCESSFULLY having arrived at this stage, he was confronted with
MacPorts’ trac and the workflows seemed more technical than he could face up to
from then on!
So his 2nd response on that ticket was, that he asked for help how to get rid
of everything (MacPorts, KDE, digiKam).

	This doesn’t sound like a success story, does it?

I helped him getting rid of everything and he’s going for a commercial product
now… :-/ In fact he’s right this minute testing it.

...

But at least this got me into testing digiKam after all and I figured out, that
our 75yr-old former MacPorts user _might_ still be with us, if digiKam had had
the ports

	kde4-workspace and qtcurve

defined as direct dependencies right from the start. These two ensure that the
OSX/MacPorts user has functioning themes via qtcurve installed and is able to
configure them using KDE’s ‘systemsettings’ tool supplied by kde4-workspace.
Luckily René developed qtcurve and kde4-workspace ports (the latter is stripped
of all the functionality not needed on OSX) which now make it much easier to
configure KDE on MacPorts.

	Yet, the problem described here does NOT ONLY exist for digiKam!
	This is a general issue for many KDE4 applications!!!

Actually kde4-workspace and qtcurve should be one of the first ports installed
after kdelibs4. The question is now, how this could be organised:

 1) Would we have to introduce these two as dependencies for all KDE apps?

 2) Does it make sense to introduce a _metaport_, which depends on kdelibs4,
    qtcurve and kde4-workspace and which all other KDE ports should in turn
    depend on - instead of directly depending on kdelibs4?

 3) Or shall we stick to our current recommendation on our KDE wiki page [2]? 

I am afraid that the latter is too error-prone - as shown in the presented
digiKam-adventure.

From my first trial-runs of digiKam I was rather impressed. Everything I tried
worked out of the box!

Thoughts?

Greets,
Marko




[1] https://trac.macports.org/ticket/47053

[2] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/KDE#Installkde4-workspaceandqtcurve