Building RKWard on Mac (continued from private discussion)

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday June 08 2017 10:13:35 Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:

> > > Ok, please check
> > > https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source/Mac  

Some quick remarks:
- theme icons aren't in fact the most crucial reason for patching Qt. As you've learned by now, the qt5-kde patches do not in fact enable theme lookups. There are also other patches to improve the KDE experience, among which a patch to prevents Qt from guessing which menu actions can be moved and put under the "About" and "Preferences" menu items in the Application menu. Their text-based heuristics (guessing from the action name) can give surprising results with more complex applications.

- the only reason you might want to associate my ports tree with a non-default prefix is if indeed you wish to run official Qt5 ports from MacPorts using the official port:qt5-* ports. The main drawback with that is that you will have to build *everything* from source in the KF5 prefix. I also think it's confusing to end up with 2 different Qt5 versions, and one MacPorts install in which you have to jump through certain steps periodically in order to ensure that the Qt5 PortGroup files are correctly installed in the 2 required locations. You also have to be certain to use the appropriate `port` command every time.

qt5-kde is designed to be (and "somewhat tested") a drop-in replacement for qt5-qtbase c.s. Once you install it all ports depending on Qt5 change their "depspecs" and will thus not attempt to install a wrong Qt5 port in addition to what you already have. Despite being a drop-in replacement you'll still rebuilding the Qt5 ports from source, though. That's hopefully not more than a precaution, but a necessary one if I want to get my ports accepted.

- please point the user to the more exhaustive instructions for adding a personal ports tree in the MacStrop repo. You missed the fact that the line has to be prepended to the list of sources, not appended!

- you could add the remark that just about all KF5 ports have a +docs variant which installs the documentation (handbook and/or apidocs). An overview of the variants a given port has can be obtained with `port variants foo`. This prints the description provided by the port author, as well as conflict indications. It can also be useful sometimes to verify a port's notes before installing it (`port notes foo`). These remarks apply in particular to a port like kf5-osx-integration-devel .

- In theory doing something wild like `port install kf5-kate` should pull in all dependencies; in practice this hasn't been tested very often. It might be a good idea to install port:qt5-kde first; that will exclude all possibility that you end up installing port:qt5-qtbase c.s. through some weird dependency cascade.

- a good way to get most common frameworks installed is `port install kf5-frameworkintegration`. This will also pull in kf5-osx-integration-devel (default install variant).

- why do you need port:coreutils with the other MacPorts-based approach?

That's all for now,

Cheers,
René