Install presence

Fri Jun 18 11:54:41 BST 2021

On Friday June 18 2021 13:19:40 Ian Wadham wrote:

>Hi Aleix,
Is Aleix actually getting these replies? Not directly in any case, unless he and Adam are the same person?

As usual Ian makes a number of good points (logical, he knows the cracking of the whip...!)

> Bugzilla is very good, but bugs sit around unsolved, wishlists are ignored and features get out of date and out of fashion when an app is “unmaintained” for several years. Users of apps do not like this.

A good example: KNode. It's one reason I'm still using KDE PIM 4

Since Ian mentioned Bugzilla: while very good as bug tracker (I think the only thing missing is a possibility to reply via email!) it is crippled (IMHO, severely) by the policy that patches are ignored there. This is not the place to discuss that, but I think it's wrong to ignore contributed fixes esp. now that peer-reviewed contribution has become yet a step more cumbersome.

And FWIW, this particular user doesn't at all like the tendency to make desktop and mobile apps look and behave the same... esp. if that means applications require recent and rather well-dimensioned hardware in order to run (properly). Mac-specific issues, Linux has always been a champion of running about just as well albeit slower on older, less powerful hardware - and KDE is pricing itself out of that market. I don't believe that technological progress in software has to come at this price. And yeah, that will affect install stats directly.

>Secondly, would-be authors of KDE apps fall foul of what I call LGM (Library Generated Maintenance). ... I was a developer on KDE Games for about 15 years and I estimate I spent about half my development time keeping up to date with library changes.

Aren't you basically putting a finger on the cost of being part of an app collection with an imposed and (often if not mostly) artificial update cycle?

> Unfortunately, the KDE apps on MacPorts are, in a word, moribund. The apps are running with KDE 4 and Qt 4 libraries (KDE 4.14.3) on MacPorts. These are compiled from snapshots of the KDE repositories. I myself use KMyMoney and KDE Games quite a lot. However that code is frozen solid - no new features or fixes available.

>As far as I know, nobody has succeeded in porting to MacPorts the KF5 library and the latest versions of source code of KDE apps, although some of us tried very hard.

This is not purely a KDE problem, though it doesn't help that most KDE developers seem to have a "more catholic than the pope" attitude towards what they consider is being native. Qt's QStandardPaths implementation dealt a huge blow to the principles upon which MacPorts s built (HB seem to care less), and the split of many components into the KDE Plasma whatever (which is not supposed to be supported outside of almost exclusively Linux) another. Getting feature-completeness means applying patches if the authors didn't do the equivalent by hand-tailoring. I spent a LOT of time and energy developing patches for Qt (mostly QSP but also to the QPA), writing a Mac version of the KDE platform theme plugin, fixing things in the QtCurve style ... and then patching out cheap and easy Mac "adaptations" from applications. The fact that the fruits of this labour never made it into MacPorts is largely their fault - but it does have to do in part with the considerable amount of patches.
That effort has been all but halted by something like Ian's LGM thing. While Qt is very good in terms of backward compatibility they're also very quick to drop support for "older" Mac OS versions. As a single maintainer of the (unofficial) KF5 MacPorts port tree I'd be working a fulltime job just keeping my system up-to-date and maintaining my effort. Easier to stick to Qt 5.9 and KF5 5.60.0 and then backport whatever is truly needed when an application truly needs an update. That way at least I can have a life off the computer, and actually use the applications.

> I used to have a flourishing development setup on Apple Mac under KDE 4 and I used it for KDE app development on MacBook for about 5 years. That all came to a grinding halt when KF5 was released.

Actually KDevelop has been stable for an almost suspiciously long time now, with dependency requirements that are easy to meet even on my system. It probably works better with newer LLVM/Clang versions than I can run (presumably) but it works more than good enough for my purposes as it is. Of course my version also has a significant number of patches that improve behaviour on Mac ... but I think we agreed to disagree about most of those O:-)

>So yes, you have a LOT of work to do before you can truly say that “KDE is All About the Apps”. All the the best and I hope your talk goes well.

Hmmm, I though this thread was about install presence. If it's about "all about the apps" then, yeah, I guess you can say that. But for a very big part that should be read as "all about the individual apps" with a few parasol groups trying to impose a form of adhesion through guidelines. But ultimately it really feels like developers care about their application(s), and often consider them their plaything (or subject of research). Not illogical or wrong in itself if you think how people usually come to FOSS development, but  feel it's a bit too rare that the user is put front and central (as it should, IMHO).

R.