MacBook KDE Development
July 20, 2009 at 20:52 by Mike McQuaid
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.
Posted in Software
Plastic? You should’ve to buy a MacBook Pro.
MacBook Pros are just too expensive for what I wanted.
Hi Mike,
I’ve been waiting for patiently for this little post to kick me into gear! And it couldn’t have come at a better time because of the tagging today, which means not only KDE4.3 but also the tagging of Marble 0.8. And because all we depend on is Qt ( if you play with the CMake file ) then it would make perfect sense to use CPack to get the stuff out there. Maybe if you start the techbase article I can add my experiences as I go along? And maybe that way we can get more people to jump on the band wagon
I didn’t like MacPorts duplicating libraries either, and after I complained on Twitter and they challenged me to do something about it, I did. So now I have my own packaging system on OS X. I confess I am hoping you’ll want to use it.
https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
Although it needs contribution rather than users at this point. But maybe it’s fun for you Mike?
@Andrew: I’ll probably only do the TechBase article when I’m basically done with CPack on KDE and it’ll be for how KDE applications can use it. You guys probably want to do it standalone. Let me know if you want me to get you started.
@Max: That looks like a cool project, nice work on getting it started. The only problem is for KDE stuff I probably want to support 10.4 and PPC so it’s out for me at the moment. Might check it out later.