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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: MacPorts: Running KDE ports on Apple OS X
From:       Frank Reininghaus <frank78ac () googlemail ! com>
Date:       2014-03-17 14:57:42
Message-ID: CAFoZWWhF0H-6fdGynV7r_Ky7=ar4R=tgzSypATetu0g3qAx9vQ () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi,

2014-03-17 14:07 GMT+01:00 Ian Wadham:
> Hello Frank,
>
> First of all, I have some good news.  I upgraded all the software
> I install from MacPorts, including KDE software.  I was going from
> 4.10.1 to 4.12.2, the latest KDE software available on MacPorts.
>
> You will be pleased to hear that Dolphin now works fine in my
> Apple MacBook and also in Marko's machine ... :-)

Cool, thanks for letting us know :-)

> On 15/03/2014, at 9:40 PM, Frank Reininghaus wrote:
>> 2014-03-15 7:10 GMT+01:00 Ian Wadham:
>> [...]
>>> And I said it would be nice to have some regular testing
>>> of Apple and Windows implementations of KDE.
>>>
>>> Well ... the response was quite antagonistic at first, but
>>> I am old and thick-skinned and I stood my ground ... :-)
>> [...]
>>> First I would like you to have look at the two threads on kde-devel@kde.org
>>>
>>> 1. "What to test for 4.13?" starts here ... it is the more controversial of the two.
>>>     http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=139418788102916&w=2
>>> 2. "Running KDE apps on Apple OS X" starts here ..
>>>     http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=139450777202393&w=2
>>>
>>> If there is anything I have said wrong please let me know
>>> on this MacPorts list.  If you agree or disagree with what I am
>>> trying to achieve, please also let me know.  Please do not get
>>> upset by anything that was written.  Every group tends to think
>>> that the people on the other side of the river have two heads, but
>>> I have found in the course of a long career, that building bridges
>>> is a good way to solve problems.
>>
>> I greatly appreciate that the "Improve KDE on Mac" initiative is getting going!
>
> Thank you.  It is something that is very important to me.
>
>> I'm sorry for sending one last mail about this issue. One might argue
>> that it will not help much, but seeing that I am now blamed in public
>> for being antagonistic, and that people have to be warned to "not get
>> upset" by my earlier responses, I just have to.
>>
>> So, to explain why I wrote my "antagonistic" responses to the "What to
>> test for 4.13" thread:
>>
>> 1. In your second mail to the thread, you said that Dolphin does
>> "discredit to KDE" because "it crashes before showing any window".
>
> No.  The problem is that too many pieces of perfectly good KDE software
> do not run well when they reach the Apple OS X environment.  That does
> not make KDE look good in that environment.  Dolphin was the most recent
> example I had come across.  It came up because a newcomer on the
> MacPorts could not build kde4-baseapps on his system - he needed it
> because he wanted to try out Dolphin.  I was able to build kde4-baseapps
> OK - I use it to get access to some kdesdk utilities and scripts, but I do
> not use Dolphin in the ordinary course of my work.  To help him out, I
> thought I would try out Dolphin, but it crashed.  This was just a day or
> two before I wrote to kde-devel.
>
> I realise now that you are the chief maintainer of Dolphin, but you
> really should not take this business so personally.  We may never know
> why Dolphin crashed on my system, but I have never thought that the
> problem lay with Dolphin, nor with any of your work on it.
>
> Rather, I think it was due to what, back in the day, we used to call
> an "integration problem".  These problems happened when you
> transplanted programs from one O/S, compiler or CPU to another.
> They were nobody's "fault" and nobody was to "blame".  It was just
> that the new environment did things differently.  It was my job to
> fix whatever problems occurred.
>
>> To be honest, I consider making such statements in public without telling
>> what the crashing version is extremely inappropriate, in particular
>> considering that you admitted later that the problematic version is 1
>> year old, and you never bothered to report the problem at
>> bugs.kde.org.
>
>> 2. Also in your second mail to the thread, but also later mails, you
>> say that too little testing is being done on Mac (which is probably
>> true). However, instead of questioning if the people who try to use
>> KDE on Mac actually report their problems upstream and try to help fix
>> them, you blame the "KDE developers" (a group which I consider myself
>> part of) for not doing enough testing on Mac, and even suggest that
>> the KDE developers who work exclusively on Linux get Mac hardware.
>
> We do indeed encourage people on the MacPorts list to report problems
> on bugs.kde.org if it is appropriate to do so, and Marko has given you
> several examples .  Often, as I thought I had explained, the problems
> are in porting and building and we have our own reporting system over
> there.  I do not think you want to be bombarded by that kind of bug report.

If the problems are due to packaging, to too old versions of the KDE
packages or the compiler, or to whatever else cannot be fixed inside
the KDE source, then reporting them at bugs.kde.org will indeed not
help much. Still, if "Dolphin crashes before showing any window" is
used as an example for the low quality of the "KDE on Mac" experience
on this mailing list, then I would prefer to be informed about it
(including some more details about the problem, such as the Dolphin
version and a backtrace) before, such that we at least have a chance
to investigate and fix the problem.

> When travelling in Germany, I once came to a town in the late afternoon
> and started looking for a hotel to stay the night.  It was quite a large,
> busy town, but I drove around and around and could not find a hotel
> anywhere.  Eventually I found a place to stop my car (it was not easy)
> and asked a passer-by.  He explained that in that town, all the hotels,
> by order of the municipal council and out of consideration for the
> residents, were confined to a special precinct.  He told me how to
> get there and I found a very nice hotel.
>
> So who was to "blame" because I could not find a hotel at first.  Nobody's,
> they just do things differently in that town.

All right, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression
that you had blamed the "KDE
developers" for the suboptimal "KDE on Mac" experience, but it seems
that I have misunderstood you.

>> The number of people of people who work to make KDE better is far too
>> small, so the result of that work is not always as good as we would
>> like it to be. Just to be clear: I fully understand that users are
>> dissatisfied if a developer introduces bugs all the time and doesn't
>> care about them, or if a bug report with many duplicates is ignored
>> for a long time.
>
> I do NOT think KDE developers are introducing bugs into the
> Apple implementations of their work.  It is extremely difficult to
> foresee what might happen when your program reaches an
> unfamiliar environment.
>
>> However, in most other situations, pointing fingers at the few people
>> who do the work and saying "you are not doing enough" is not exactly
>> helpful.
>
> If I seemed to be saying that, I am sorry.  It was not my intention at all.
> Nor was I aiming at any particular individual.

OK, understood. Thanks.

> I *do* think that it is necessary to do additional checks on KDE software
> that is going to the Apple or Microsoft environment and yes, that does
> mean some extra work for somebody, either at the KDE end or the other
> end or both, but probably not for you.
>
>> In fact, seeing this attitude over and over again in mailing
>> lists, forums, etc., is slowly ruining my motivation to do any work on
>> KDE at all. This is the reason why I sometimes get a bit upset when I
>> see someone say "The KDE developers have to/are not doing enough/...".
>
> Lighten up and do not let it get to you that way.  Software maintenance
> has always been a thankless task and users usually tell you when
> things go wrong, but rarely when they go right.

Yes, indeed. Maybe the "things go wrong" messages that are
continuously being delivered to my inbox (in particular those that
were in violation of the Code of Conduct) have made me a bit too
sensitive.

> It is a pity too that, in
> the Open Source world, we so rarely meet our users or even know who
> they are or how many there are.  It is a wonderful thing to see the smile
> on somebody's face when something is going right for them because of
> a program you wrote.

Yes, you are right. Let me conclude by emphasizing that I appreciate
your initiative to make "KDE on Mac" better, and I hope that many
happy users, and even more important, new contributors will be the
result.

Thanks,
Frank

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