Archives: July 2009

MacBook KDE Development

July 20, 2009 at 20:52 by

Recently while looking for a replacement for my trusty Dell laptop I ended up being sucked into buying a piece of white shiny plastic that apparently doubles as a computer.

I tried running Linux on it but due to some still unresolved issue it’s not really usable as a main operating system yet on this laptop so I’ve been forcing myself to use OSX for a while and trying to learn some lessons from it.

As my first main contribution to the KDE Mac project I’ve been working at getting the packages easily buildable and distributable without MacPorts/Fink by using CPack (a cross-platform packaging tool that comes with CMake). This is the type of project that will probably be mostly committed in a oner into KDE Libs (post-review) and hopefully then available to basically any KDE project with a little configuration. I’m planning on starting with getting some basic packages without dependencies first (e.g. without KDELibs or DBus bundled) and then work up to an application bundle that contains all library and executable dependencies. If you’re interested what the result might look like then take a look at the Mendeley Desktop OSX package, built entirely using CPack that I produces while working at Mendeley.

Another thing I’ve found while building KDE for OSX is the need to build universal packages for all the KDE dependencies. This omits Fink unfortunately so I’ve ended up using MacPorts. Due to a decision I disagree with I’ve contributed to Harald Fernengel’s project for adding dummy versions of MacPorts packages that are already available on OSX Leopard. You can find this on gitorious.

For anyone interested, the current minimal dependencies for various packages in trunk are listed below:
kdelibs: pcre++, shared-mime-info, jpeg, giflib, libpng, dbus
akonadi: shared-mime-info, boost
kdepimlibs: gpgme, libical
kdepim: none

Once I’ve got a bit further I’ll get all this stuff on TechBase. Anyone interested in helping out or lending an opinion feel free to leave a comment.

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