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

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday October 17 2015 15:52:14 Ian Wadham wrote:

Hi Ian,

This is getting a bit (very) off-topic ;)

>On my system, Xcode.app/Contents occupies 3.8 gigabytes on a 500 gigabyte disk.  The

Xcode for 10.9 is considerably larger than that. I don't know exactly how much, I rip out the SDKs I don't need ASAP after each install (plus the phone simulator and related crud). That's a lot of space, at the top of that in lots of small files (which means actual disk waste is even larger).

>space is not so much a problem, but download and install/update times _are_.  That's why

You have to take into consideration that more and more Macs don't have (user-)replaceable storage, which to me means that we're back where we were 15-20y ago when replacing a disk wasn't as evident as it is (or used to be) right now. The scale is different (on the storage size), but that's (more than?) cancelled out by the scale differences on the requirement size.

>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

Dolphin is of very limited interest on OS X, IMHO, until platform integration (with the hw) becomes MUCH better. The others, esp. KDevelop, are productivity tools. They *are* apps for real men...

>get some competition from Gimp and Inkscape, which are already easily installable
>on Apple OS X.

Erm, and those are apps for real women? ;)
I don't know Krita well enough to compare it to Gimp or any of the other more native offerings available. Inkscape is more comparable to Karbon. It is probably much more mature (given its age) but might also be more limited in application. Either way, its dependence on GTk means it's only as usable in "native" version as the latest quartz support in GTk2 (GTk3 support is still experimental, and I have no idea how well that version does "Cocoa").

>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.

I find KMail (Kontact) immensely useful, a true alternative to Apple Mail from back in the day when it was still a serious contender (10.6). It's only bogged down by Akonadi, but even that's something you don't notice on a good day. Digikam could be a valuable app, and so could KDEnlive (that one would really benefit from better drag-and-drop though).

>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

I rarely go there other than for upgrades, but it doesn't amaze me too much, after Apple crippled their nice iWork suite so much.

>Calligra on Apple IMHO.

First impressions from 2.9.8 contradict that. The UI is more Apple-like than LibreOffice's but also gets in your face *a lot* (it's huge). Worse, support for file formats *including* OpenOffice formats is considerably worse than LibreOffice's. That's a big problem, IMHO.
On OS X I simply keep using Pages 09 (also because I have many documents by now that are written with it).

>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...

Strange, eh? I forget the name of the KDE dev who got in the "news" the other day for claiming KF5 still wasn't stable.
I agree with him, for support you only have to look at the sheer frequency of "New KF5 Version is Out And Fixes LOOOTS of Bugs" headlines. Rapid version changes are a telltale sign of immaturity in my book.

>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!"? … :-)

Games have always represented a waste of disk space, no? ;)

>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… :-)

To me it reeks more of being more catholic than the pope, but whatever.

>You are fixing up icons on Kate, but have you thought about how to handle language

What icons, btw? The application icon(s), or the ones used for toolbars?

>translation across platforms?  Or any of the dozen or so other complexities that KDE
>apps contain?

Bundling everything in autonomous app bundles that might even be had through the App Store also means Joe McUser and family will expect that applications open documents "the mac way". That means registering the document types, and above all, coping with the OS X way of argument passing. I know that's possible wit Qt, but it was sufficiently not automatic with Qt4 that I never bothered trying to implement it until now (I also have my own wrapper utility that does the heavy lifting).

R.