Install presence

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday June 19 2021 11:54:08 Ian Wadham wrote:
>> Regarding mac, it's the platform I'm the least familiar with. My
>> impression is that it's better that it's not populated at all than
>> having every project feel half-baked there.

If you don't hand-tailor applications and do not patch Qt, half-baked might be more than you'd get, on Mac; for instance, applications would lack all icons that aren't embedded, and will probably not find their runtime resources because those will be installed into the wrong standard locations. Aleix may know this from his work on KDevelop.


FWIW, I created a Phab. task once about patching the ECM so that Mac builds should work a bit better but can still opt to use the standard Unixy way of building (= like they are now, for use with patched Qt or simply with a hand-tailored build systems). I think that simply went forgotten without ever attracting any attention. Idem for questions I've posted on the frameworks devel ML since probably a bit before that already; it's as if people have moved on to whipping other cats (oooohhh ... KDE on mobile...??).

>> We might need someone who
>> cares to push through. But we also need to know it's worth the effort.

Be prepared to pay such a person, or (in case of MacPorts) to "bribe" the powers that be so that s/he at least gets commit access to the official ports tree repository in order to avoid having to fuss and/or being tarpitted. (I get the impression that HB is even fussier about accepting new entries but IIRC they already have the KF5 frameworks.)

>René, Marko Kaening and I were able to get the KDE 4 apps running much better, but had no way to advertise the fact to users.

Other than the Wiki which is probably not consulted by many. BTW, all of the KDE4 apps are maintained by a single person who is of a very careful nature (probably understandably given the huge cardhouse he is responsible of); Marko sadly died a few years back while we were gaining momentum to get an initial selection of KF5 ports up for inclusion review.

>So, maybe you are right - regrettably. It would be a huge effort to get current KDE releases to run in MacPorts. I think the MacPorts developers would provide help and advice, but a few years back Marko, René and I repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly asked for help and advice from KDE core developers and none was forthcoming.

I doubt that has changed much, with the exception of 1 new maintainer who seems to be on a wavelength quite similar to mine.

Right now, if we'd want to get even the KF5 frameworks accepted a decision would have to be made how to deal with the Qt5 problem. My own patched Qt5 port is designed to be an install alternative for the official one (I do have a minimal set of patches for Qt 5.12.6, which I've only been able to test on Linux so no guarantees there). I've found it prohibitively difficult to co-operate with the Qt5 port maintainer though, and the general opinion is that Qt5 is a problematic port that breaks easily. so the best approach might be to add a Qt glue library that provides at least an alternative version of the QSP that does work as we'd want (= point to standard XDG locations). My current approach already uses an alternative class (QExtStandardPaths) and good old CPP macros injected via the compiler commandline to get code to use it. If memory serves me well I already have a PoC glue library that could be injected in a similar fashion (commandline, or a CMake hook provided via the ECM).

> I fear however that Apple may come out with a new version of its OS that makes it impossible to run the KDE 4 apps. 

As long as Qt4 can be made to build and Apple's SIP and related annoyances can still be turned off those apps should continue to run. If not, that might simply mean that Macs are no longer intended to be general-purpose desktop computers (I for one have decided years ago already that my 2011 MBP is the last new Mac I'll ever have bought).
Either way, I kind of doubt that KDE as an organisation are very thrilled about continued use of KDE4 apps...

>> My impression at the moment is that we should only be on platforms
>> where we're present on their main apps forum rather than just lateral
>> ones (F-Droid, Homebrew, downloadable msi or dmg files, etc).
>
>That’s your (KDE Community’s) prerogative, but watch out for babies and bath water…

Either way, the only choice KDE have in this matter is whether or not they appoint someone officially in charge of that presence. They could try legal action to get their software out of a platform but I don't see how that could succeed with the current licensing model.

R.