KDE Development on Windows
Chris
DeveloperChris at rebel.com.au
Wed Apr 2 12:13:24 UTC 2014
Thanks Cristian
My comments should be seen as positive criticisms. As you are well aware I
have had many problems getting a working environment in windows. The emerge
system is a wonderful collection of software. When it works it is fantastic,
unfortunately it is very fragile. Being a 'newb' certainly doesn't help.
Lesson one never do emerge emerge unless you are ready for the consequences.
Its what killed my effort two years ago. Foolishly I just did it again :(
I agree that there is not enough people doing it on windows. it makes it
very hard for those of us who are trying to do it. Boudewijn Rempt has done
a magnificent job in creating an environment that works for him hopefully I
can replicate his efforts and share my positive experiences with all. Sadly
they are lacking at the moment.
Much of the problems that occur are due to design choices. They are
completely understandable. But this thread was started with the comment
about increasing cross platform compatibility. Without knowing the
frustrations of those of us who are trying to achieve that goal how is that
ever going to happen. Even if those frustrations occasionally boil over into
rants.
Perhaps there are few windows developers because we don't get a platform to
air our grievances?
Chris
On 2/04/2014 8:07 PM, Cristian Onet, wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just my 2 cents on this. Rants won't help improving anything. The most
> important cause that's holding back KDE on Windows development, I think,
> is the number of people working on it and their spare time. So, this being
> open source, if you have a itch please scratch it. I admit that KDE on
> Windows could be much better but what we have now is more than nothing (we
> can at least run KDE applications on Windows) and I'm thankful for the
> people that made that happen. The rest is up to each of us.
>
> So please stop the rants and have positive contributions instead.
>
> Cristian
>
> P.S: thanks to the KDE on Windows project KMyMoney can run on Windows and
> I'm grateful for that (and I say the package provided by the KMyMoney
> development team is pretty stable)
>
>
> 2014-04-02 11:07 GMT+03:00 Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org
> <mailto:boud at valdyas.org>>:
>
> Well, you post it as a rant, but I have to agree... The big problem is
> that KDE4 is both a platform and a development framework, and the two
> are mixed together.
>
> For Krita, I've stopped using the emerge system to get the dependencies,
> because it's just too fragile. It's wonderful if you want to setup a
> system with more than one kde application, but it didn't work for me
> for creatinga single, standalone application that I could package and
> distribute.
>
> I'm now using a cmake project with a bunch of externals. However,
> building all the dependencies takes ages, too, so for my co-workers, I
> just share my dev env with them, binary. I am building with msvc 2012,
> so there is no pre-built Qt and there is no webkit. Oh, and
> update-mime-database doesn't build correctly, so I need a pre-prepared
> mime directory to package. I still haven't managed to strip down the
> oxygen icon set, either, and that's the biggest part of the download.
>
> I am using a stripped-down kdelibs without dbus, kded, soprano -- and
> I probably should cut out attica and so on as well. Part of this will
> be solved by kf5, but since kxmlgui still needs dbus, part of it
> won't, if I continue to use kxmlgui. Feel free to clone and hack:
> http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=clones%2Fkdelibs%2Frempt%2Fkdelibs-stripped.git
>
> Note that I've hardcoded this kdelibs to store settings in
> AppData\Local|Roaming\krita, not .kde, but still there is one or two
> things in kde that seems hardcode to .kde.
>
> Also, no dbus means no kioslaves.
>
> Sysoca is pretty much the biggest bug-bear of my life on Windows.
> Because krita/calligra actually uses the plugin query language in a
> lot of places, I cannot replace it with simply loading all local
> plugins. If you, for kmymoney, would just move to the Qt plugin system
> instead of the KDE one, you probably would be fine and save a lot of
> aggravation.
>
> My current dev setup is like this:
>
> c:\dev\desktop32
> c:\dev\desktop64
> c:\dev\desktop32_d
> c:\dev\desktop64_d
>
> i.e., base development directories for 32 and 64 bits builds,
> relwithdebinfo and debug.
>
> Inside, I have an i directory where I install everything, and my
> source tree, build directories and so on.
>
> Because I've hacked kbuildsycoca and krita's main to look for paths
> relative to the exe, instead of environment variables, all these
> installations run locally, without setting any environment and without
> sharing anything.
>
>
> On Wed, 2 Apr 2014, Chris wrote:
>
> <rant>
> As a developer who is trying to compile and then improve kmymoney
> on windows I must say it is the most painful process.
>
> If you want portability for KDE apps you need to uncouple
> applications from a lot of the hardcore KDE stuff. Just creating a
> suitable environment for building kmymoney has proved exhausting
> to the point of wanting to give up. Is it really worth the agro?
>
> I gave up two years ago and I am close to doing so again. What
> would help is a way of isolating those libraries that are
> absolutely necessary AND make it possible to have both a release
> copy of an application and a dev copy running on the same machine.
> Currently the plugin architecture forbids it without some serious
> acrobatics. Why the plugin system can't load a plugin that is in
> the same directory as the application I do not know. Thats the way
> dll's are loaded. App directory first, shared folders last. Why do
> I even need ksycoca4 I'll never know. Are you really trying to
> emulate windows registry? one of the worst inventions like ahh ever.
>
> Now I have to get back to the build process it appears a library
> that I was able to build last week cant be built this week. seems
> it cant find a header file... sighhhh....
>
> Oh and keep moving things to git that's is definately a major
> improvement.
>
> Did you hear subversion is moving to git.... No wait 1st of April ;)
>
> Chris
> </rant>
>
> On 2/04/2014 6:23 AM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
> On Tue, 1 Apr 2014, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>
> On 1 April 2014 20:31, Doug <dmcgarrett at optonline.net
> <mailto:dmcgarrett at optonline.net>> wrote:
>
>
> In my experience, there are very few KDE programs that
> work in Windows. I
> think the only ones I have are Dolphin, Find Files,
> and Kate, and I think,
> Solitaire.
>
>
> Maybe but I think it's not a technical barrier but missing
> apps need
> dedicated mainainers for Windows.
>
>
> Well, krita, too, but most windows users don't see the KDE
> part... Except in the about box, of course. There were
> technical barriers though, like stripping out dbus, kded,
> running kbuildsycoca4 after install. Other barriers still
> exist, like translations not working (except, weirdly enough,
> for the choose-language dialog box).
>
> Boud
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