[KDE/Mac] [OS X] adding a link module to all KF5 targets

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Christoph and René,

On 15/10/2015, at 7:34 PM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Thursday October 15 2015 09:14:42 Christoph Cullmann wrote:
> Ian wrote:
>>> KDE and its Frameworks and KF5 successors EMBRACE file-sharing between
>>> applications, utilities and libraries.
>> Actually, I here already disagree.
> 
> Hmmm?
> 
>> At least some KDE application developers like me or the Krita team want is to have self contained installers/bundles,
>> as that is the normal way to go there.
> 
> Not *the* normal way, *a* normal way, for applications where this makes sense. Bigger and more complex *suites* of applications more often than not use some kind of installer to put the various things in their respective places.
> Xcode itself came that way, until Apple in their infinite loopdom decided to ship it via the App Store. The result is a humongous bundle that contains everything the dev community as a whole might ever need (until "that time of year" when 10.n+1 rears its increasingly ugly head). Have a look at its size and also note the true size (a priori the thing is compressed with HFS+ compression).

On my system, Xcode.app/Contents occupies 3.8 gigabytes on a 500 gigabyte disk.  The
space is not so much a problem, but download and install/update times _are_.  That's why
I am still on OS X 10.7 (Lion) from about 4 years ago.  On a good day, I get to download about
0.5 megabytes per second.  KDE servers get down to < 0.1Mbytes/sec sometimes.

Do the arithmetic… :-)

For me, and the other users of my home Internet connection, that is too much inconvenience
for something I rarely use (deliberately)…  However, MacPorts users and _all_ developers
need to install Xcode as a pre-requisite (by Apple) for getting the usual UNIX command-line
facilities…  Fortunately those do not often change… :-) … not much since the early 90s… :-)

Christoph, earlier you wrote:
> I thought we want to have frameworks that work as native on the different operating systems as qt.
> 
> That means for Mac we need to make them usable for application bundles. And we
> need then to decide which KDE applications make sense on Mac (like Krita, Kate,
> KDevelop, Dolphin, ...) and make these applications workable with the frameworks.

Kate, KDevelop and Dolphin are not what I call "real" applications, in the sense that
"real men don't eat quiche"… :-)  They are developers' tools.  Also I think Krita might
get some competition from Gimp and Inkscape, which are already easily installable
on Apple OS X.

For me, "real" applications are those that a lot of users want to use or apps that are
unique of their kind or that are demonstrably superior to other offerings.  From the KDE
Community, I am thinking of KMyMoney, Calligra (w/p, spreadsheet and presentation
apps), Digikam (photo editing and cataloguing), KMail (but not the rest of the PIM stuff,
which my 'phone can do), various KDE Edu offerings, KDEnlive (movie and audio edit)
and my own development interest, KDE Games.

Some of these KDE apps are world-class, besides being free… :-)  Others have
nothing quite like them on Apple OS X.  At the Apple store, the recommended office
software is Microsoft Office!!!!  I use LibreOffice, but there is a real opportunity for
Calligra on Apple IMHO.

Out of the above, I really only have KMyMoney and KDE Games working properly
on OS X, even in KDE 4.  And I suppose I will have _none_ of them working in KF5
anytime soon.  For example, only the simplest of the games have been fully ported
to KF5.  There are just not enough developers working on KDE apps any more…
And not many core developers either… and minimum support by them for OS X...

So if you go ahead with your plan, Christoph, will we perhaps have a KBlocks app
(a Tetris clone) where the app bundle is bigger than that for Angry Birds?  If a user
asks to download ALL the KDE Games, will he or she get a warning message to
say, "Watch out! Here comes a flock of 10-tonne canaries!"? … :-)

For me, all this KF5 stuff puts a barrier in the way of further KDE development work,
by me, so I am deeply sorry you cannot or will not help us.

Nevertheless, I hope you can succeed in this plan for monolithic KF5 apps, on
which you seem to be hell-bent.  I hope you are not falling foul of the "Village Venus"
fallacy of thinking, in which one falls in love with the first good-looking idea that
comes along… :-)

You are fixing up icons on Kate, but have you thought about how to handle language
translation across platforms?  Or any of the dozen or so other complexities that KDE
apps contain?  And have you budgeted any bundle sizes yet?  How much of Qt will
have to be in each bundle, for instance?

All the best, Ian W.