Install presence

[Ian Wadham]

Hi René and Aleix,

> On 22 Jun 2021, at 6:57 am, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday June 20 2021 20:53:55 Jeremy Whiting wrote:
>> All of the above is based on the idea that yes, we want KDE applications to
>> work well on MacOS. I'm not sure if that's the consensus or not.
> 
> I just remembered an episode a few years back. I was discussing a Mac tweak of on of the plasma components on the plasma-devel ML (could have been DrKonqi, could have been the platform plugin, or ) and one of the key plasma devs said something tell-tale like "I think I'm going to break that, just because I can". I presume it's still easy to elicit a knee-jerk reaction there by invoking the idea of supporting a relevant set of KCMs on other platforms…

I think this may have been to do with DrKonqi, which was not working on Mac OSX and probably never had worked there.

In the second and third quarters of 2014, I was working on fixing DrKonqi and KCrash. The end-result of the problems was that users of KDE apps on Apple Mac could not report crashes to KDE developers. DrKonqi either never appeared on Apple Mac or died immediately or failed to reach the dialog for submitting a bug on bugs.kde.org. Hence very few bug reports were reaching KDE developers from Apple Mac, even though there were lots of bugs in the KDE code for Apple Mac.

You may have visited the Plasma devs about this, René. During the transition from KDE 4 to KF5, they unilaterally decided to move the source code of DrKonqi from KDE 4’s kde-runtime to somewhere in the KF5 Plasma source-code tree, thus making it more-or-less inaccessible for porting to other platforms. I hope it has been returned to somewhere more suitable now.

@Aleix: I believe you and Aaron Seigo may have corresponded with René and me about this. Your names also appear in the reviews on Reviewboard of my bug-fixes for DrKonqi.

Cut to the chase… https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/2014-October/084208.html, "Review Request 120431: Fix and future-proof Dr Konqi security methods on Bugzilla”, is a thread extracted from Reviewboard. In July 2014, Bugzilla changed to its version 4.4.5 on bugs.kde.org. At one stroke, this crippled DrKonqi on all platforms and in all versions of KDE source code: KDE 4 and KF5, on Linux, Windows and Apple OSX, because the method of validating DrKonqi’s access to bugs.kde.org had changed. See also bug report https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337742 from July 2014.

With a little help from Ben Cooksley, I had been able to develop a patch for DrKonqi that would retrieve and test the version number of Bugzilla and then use the connection protocol required by that version. The patch was also written so as to be forward-portable to KF5’s DrKonqi, with one or two changes of line numbers.

I had tested the patch thoroughly on Apple OSX, using a test database for bugs.kde.org, provided by Ben Cooksley.

Now read the review. I get nit-picked to death! No way I wanted to try and work with those guys any more after that.

In the review, it is only when the realisation dawns on KDE people that KF5 will-be/is-already failing that I get some serious reaction. But still not much action. In the end, I had to threaten to do my own “Ship It”, to be sure to get the fix into the next bug-fix release of KDE 4, which was just a day or two away. But then Albert Astals Cid released the change for me, with just a few hours to spare, and someone else forward-ported the same change into KF5, as I had designed it to happen.

I also had had two earlier reviews, of patches to correct the many bugs in the Apple OSX implementation of DrKonqi and Crash, and had similar experiences. At least one of those bugs also applied to Linux, Windows, KDE 4 and KF5.

Then the above-mentioned bug report dragged on till after Christmas 2014, because of another bug that appeared only in LINUX versions of DrKonqi after Bugzilla changed versions in July 2014. It was fun trying to debug THAT on Apple OSX, I DON’T think! I had to get end-users to generate logs for me. Again there was almost no help from KDE core developers, but at least they did forward-port my fix for that problem into KF5 again.

@Aleix: Good luck with your talk and everything… :-)

Cheers,
Ian W.