Problems of KDE software on MacPorts

Why these pages?

When software is ported from one hardware or operating-system environment to another, problems arise that are nobody's fault. The original software writers can try their best to avoid such problems, but they cannot be expected to foresee every issue. These pages are a place where issues of KDE software on MacPorts can be gathered together for easy visibility and people from KDE and MacPorts can co-operate to narrow each issue down to a point where it can be assigned to a specific area on the KDE Bugtracking System or the MacPorts Ticket System for action. Also, co-operation is needed to set up a continuous testing system, in the longer term, to minimize problems in the future.

These pages were initiated by ​this post on KDE-MAC and a PM discussion regarding ​Randa Meetings participation of MacPorts developers.

Special maintainer/developer information - which is not covered in the KDE wiki page - could also be gathered here.

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Tickets for specific KDE software issues

Information regarding specific tickets has been moved to a dedicated page.

All other tickets of category "kde4" can be listed in one big table. (Be aware that the generation of this table needs a few seconds on MacPorts' trac.)

New version of KDE applications

We're working on keeping the KDE applications distributed via MacPorts in sync with ​KDE's official release schedule. However, on MacPorts the current version of KDE libraries and applications is usually a little behind, as only one of us (nicos) is maintaining all these ports.

If you want to support us, please find our up-to-date list of problems for some KDE software ports kept in ​dports/kde/TODO.txt and report any issues found on ​KDE-MAC or ​MacPorts-Devel mailing lists or ​KDE's bug tracker.

Continuous Integration of KDE software

KDE's developers are running a ​Jenkins-based CI system for the most of the KDE software. This is fully functioning for Linux (and close to that for OSX) as of now. A Windows-CI system is in development at the moment.

There is also a set of ​code-vetting software called English Breakfast Network (EBN, for short) which supports all developers in writing cleaner code and documentation.

An overview regarding KDE/CI can be found on a dedicated KDE/MacPorts CI page. If you're interested in setting up an alternative CI system, you can check the current status of an OSX/CI system based on MacPorts which doesn't require Jenkins in order to function.

Qt5 and KF5

Qt5 eventually lead to the new ​KDE Frameworks. As tracked in #37331 is was possible to create a portfile ​qt5-mac.

This means that we can soon start adding KF5 frameworks as new ports.

An important issue is that the introduction of KF5 will take a while and thus needs to be made in such a way, that Qt4/KDE4 and Qt5/KF5 frameworks and applications can coexist with one another. The port qt5-mac, however, does not allow to install qt4-mac in parallel. This is why René has put a lot of effort into bringing a concurrent variant into qt5-mac. This is still under development and needs testing!

So, if you're enthusiastic about a concurrent Qt5 and/or KF5 on MacPorts, please support us!

These tickets are currently dealing with Qt4/Qt5-coinstallability:

#48967 - submission: port:qt5-kde
#50966 - Qt5 PortGroup files; preparing for port:qt5-kde and the KF5 port family
#46238 - co-installable qt4-mac and qt5-mac step1 : qt4-mac +concurrent
#46496 - co-installable qt4-mac and qt5-mac step2 : qt5-mac
#46536 - qt5-mac-devel submission: provides Qt 5.4.x
#47047 - qt5-mac-mysql-plugins
#46240 - kde4 1.1 PortGroup file adaptation to qt4-mac +concurrent
#46239 - qca and qca-ossl adaptations to qt4-mac +concurrent

Other stuff:

#46558 - phonon-backend-gstreamer update to 4.8.2 and qt5 support
#46552 - phonon update to 4.8.3, with Qt5 support

This is the starting point for KF5:

#46978 - extra-cmake-modules (being the basis for creating KF5 ports)
#48184 - kf5-attica (exemplarily) plus new kf5 port group

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Additional information

• MacPorts-Wiki
• KDE - Installing KDE applications with MacPorts
• ​KDE Community wiki for Mac
• ​KDE Techbase Wiki: Installing a development environment using MacPorts (somewhat outdated, still needs to be tested with current versions of OSX and KDE software)
• ​KDE Applications/Cross Platform Issues page on the "KDE Community Wiki"

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Other resources

• ​KDE-MAC mailing list
• ​Git repository of a dedicated MacPorts tree for tests of KDE software on ​KDE Projects playground which also contains helpful ​environment and bash files for MacPorts users and port maintainers
• ​Ian's git repository dedicated to "Fixes for KDE problems that occur on Apple OS X"
• ​kde-mac group on KDE's ReviewBoard