Unite efforts

[tlvince]

KDE on Homebrew is currently quite dispersed; there's at least two other independent repos carrying KDE formulae:

• somekool/homebrew
• Anonymooseable/homebrew-kde

homebew/boneyard contains a few (kdelibs, oxygen-icons etc.) and has three open issues (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-boneyard/issues/19, https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-boneyard/pull/18, https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-boneyard/pull/17) relating to them.

@aseques wrote a formulae for Marble and Digikam back in 2012, which I used (along with pointers from a now-deleted homebrew-digikam repo @dzubi kindly sent me a couple of months ago) as a base to get a working build of Digikam v3.5.0: I'm interested in maintaing a formulae for Digikam (https://github.com/adymo/homebrew-kde/pull/9) and so came to this repo (adymo/homebrew-kde, via the KDE Mac wiki) as it appears to be the most up-to-date.

I'm proposing to unite efforts and work together towards a single canonical homebrew-kde. It'd be great if we could get this under the Homebrew GitHub organisation.

@somekool, thanks a lot for your work in somekool/homebrew. It'd be great to continue your work and bring the formulae up-to-date.

Unfortunately, as the formulae are in a fork of the main Homebrew repo (perhaps with the thought of getting them merged quickly?), it makes it difficult for users to make use of them; I think they'd be better off in a tap. Prior experience tells me the core homebrew contributors prefer specialist/grouped forumale be maintained this way.

@Anonymooseable, I noticed you recently added a big "NOT MAINTAINED" notice to your repo (which I believe is derived from @somekool's), probably in response to https://github.com/Anonymooseable/homebrew-kde/pull/3? Perhaps if there's interest in this, you'd like to delete/redirect to here?

Also, @somekool's repo contains ~230 KDE formulae. Should we try to maintain formulae for the entire suite, or be more selective as per @adymo's approach? As far as I'm aware, most of the work is done in the base and kde-libs formulae, so it may be achievable. @somekool also has a script that automates updating most formulae.

Thoughts all?

[aseques]

I would be mostly interested into having some key apps for me, that is kate, krita and digikam, along with that all most of the kde enviroment needs to be built. My main problem is that I have only access to my laptop with mac and it's an old core2 duo without much power to compile :( In any case all the efforts to move kde from the boneyard to a tap would be nice, I'll be for deleting them from the boneyard once somewhere else too.

[adymo]

There's also philacs/homebrew-calligra repository maintained by @philacs. However, that uses so called stripped kdelibs for minimal installation.

[adymo]

Yes, I'd be interested in making the one maintained kde homebrew repository and moving it later to Homebrew.

But I'd strongly recommend to only add apps that are actually used. It's not enough to compile the program. It may not work well on Mac OS and require patching. That happened to me with KDevelop and to @tlvince with Digikam already.

So I'd rather add apps to the repository only if there's a person using that app and willing to maintain it. Once we'll become popular enough, people will add more apps.

[mxj4]

I'd like to merge homebrew-calligra to homebrew-kde and use common kdelibs instead of stripped one.

[lheckemann]

You've got kate working? Brilliant! This is why I wanted KDE on mac in the first place.

Sorry, I'll only be leeching though. I have little free time at the moment, and don't really know what I'm doing in homebrew, ruby or building KDE anyway.

[adymo]

@philacs, @tlvince I'll review/merge Digikam and Calligra formulas on Monday, I won't be near a Mac before that. I can give you guys commit access to this repository if you would like. I'd be interested to build a working, solid, maintained kde tap together. Then we could move it under Homebrew/.

[aseques]

I just was looking into this, and I see that the docs in the wiki point to the someskool branch in github, what about updating this to point to adymo's?

[mjobin-mdsol]

It would certainly make sense to unite effort. one of the problem I had is that homebrew installs everything in separate folder, while KDE likes to have everything under $KDEDIR (maybe that variable is legacy, I'm not too sure anymore). And since all Formulae are very similar one another, I created a KDEBaseClass to Inherit upon. Thus most of my recipes can be automatically generated quite easily. as mentioned before, I have a script that does that. I'm just being careful before committing the changes.

as much as possible, I tried to keep the individual recipe empty or easily auto-generateable and have all custom exceptions done through some sort of helper.

IIRC I had some issues with akonadi and soprano.

I recently upgraded my Mac to 10.9 with most recent Xcode, I don't know if that would help or create new problems.

[mjobin-mdsol]

@aseques maybe you are talking about the KDE wiki? If so, I may have added that link myself, since I knew of no other good alternative. feel free to list all valid alternatives or only keep one if there is one fully and easily working. So far, it seems all version have their pluses.

if there are any interests, I can update my fork to have the most recent KDE version...

[mjobin-mdsol]

I just reran my script, it's good to have this automated as it picks up new packages automatically.

https://github.com/somekool/homebrew/commit/ab56eec2b24f801a887925be0ff033f6f7f2e724

I'm just being careful before commit, as I have several things I do not want to overwrite/lose. I've committed what I would have lost into a separate branch for your viewing pleasure.

https://github.com/somekool/homebrew/commit/0e1a4a64e9d44b793d0fb311df7623beb2d35152

and this is by base class.

https://github.com/somekool/homebrew/blob/kde_on_brew/master/Library/Formula/base_kde_formula.rb

[tlvince]

@mjobin-mdsol, as @adymo mentioned, I think we're leaning towards hand-picking specific KDE apps (with someone taking ownership of maintenance) over generating formulae in batch. Thoughts on this?

As I've encountered with Digikam, sometimes writing a formula to compile the app isn't enough; further work is often needed to get it running properly (on OS X).

[mjobin-mdsol]

I am well aware many apps will require its own share of love. At the same time, many should just install the same way, or common fixes should be reusable. And you will still end up with a growing list of packages to update manually, which is something I hate doing myself. I understand people don't mind it as much...

I think my way of regenerating everything and simply being careful of not deleting important stuff is quite efficient and I don't see a bad side about it. Many new packages picked up by the script looks to be dependencies, I'd hate having to find them manually.

it might feel counter productive to have hundreds of not fully tested recipe and we should definitely have a way to mark them off. Having a dedicated maintainer taking ownership for important apps is a great idea.

that said, the important part is giving access to excellent KDE apps to Mac users. So, whatever please you guys the best.

[adymo]

I definitely understand the desire to automate this and share it for myself. But I'd rather carefully grow this tap by adding only apps that work and patching them one by one as needed. We can automate any time afterwards.

At this point quantity doesn't matter. There're lots of apps for Mac. If we want people to use KDE apps, we should put a stress on quality.

[mjobin-mdsol]

makes sense

[mjobin-mdsol]

by the way, I only learned about homebrew Taps recently. I believe they did not exist when I started working on this. definitely the way to go, ...

feel free to remove/replace references to my fork as you find them across the interweb. I'll take some time to update my README so people are directed here. my fork isn't usable by end user anyway.

[adymo]

@tlvince, @philacs, I've added you as collaborators to this project so you can commit your formulas for yourself. Just please move your patches to either formula or some .diff file inside the repository. Let's also look at runtime problems.

[gbaty]

Hello, I have written basic formula for filelight, kompare, konsole and kde-baseapps (dolphin, konqueror). All these software compile and run but konsole shortcuts are not very convenient. You can pull it from my fork but I am not sure about required dependencies. Other questions : is there a mailing list to discuss about kde homebrew or better place than here ? Is there a script to automatically update version numbers and associated sha sum ?

[gbaty]

Ok, all kde apps yet exists in somekool/homebrew, is it planned to merge it here ?

[dant3]

+1 for dolphin, I'm missing good FM on MacOS X

[tlvince]

@gbaty, as mentioned above, we're going for quality over quantity in this repo as we've found many apps require more work than just compiling to run properly on OS X.

There isn't a homebrew-KDE specific mailing list AFAIK, but there are general KDE Mac mailing lists and forums.

Could you file a pull request with your formulae? Would you be willing to maintain them?

[gbaty]

Thnak you for your answer. Ok, I must check formula and fix a build problem on kde-baseapps before pull-request. Once commited, no problem to maintain it.

[haraldF]

In case anyone is interested in KDE Frameworks 5 on Mac/homebrew, check out https://github.com/haraldF/homebrew-kf5

[mxj4]

@haraldF Awesome. Looks like we don't need to install everything to same kdedir anymore. I'm still curious what exactly happened to the kbuildsycoca4 issue with homebrew prefix system, even if due to some reason kbuildsycoca4 cannot find the correct path, we can set KDEDIRS variable explicitly to circumvent that, right?

[haraldF]

@philacs Haven't gotten around to kparts and kbuildsycoca yet :) I barely have kwrite up & running, will expand from that.

[jlayt]

Hey, great news on co-ordinating efforts, will be great to have a single tap for KDE. It's not currently very active, but KDAB had a branch going at https://github.com/KDAB/Homebrew/tree/kde-4.10 that may have useful stuff too. Can I just ask that if you have any code or build fixes to please upstream them to KDE? As a KDE dev I'd be happy to help on that count. Feel free to use the kde-mac mailing list for co-ordinating these efforts. Any coordination with the MacPorts guys on patches would be great as well.

[haraldF]

Hi John, thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out. I upstreamed all build fixes, the patches in my formulas are just temp. things that I haven't gotten around to fix or temp. fixes that need cleanups.