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List:       kde-mac
Subject:    Re: Install presence
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2021-06-22 5:43:53
Message-ID: 9EAB62DD-3075-4C3E-B34E-63F86908C090 () gmail ! com
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Hi René and Aleix,

> On 22 Jun 2021, at 6:57 am, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin@gmail.com> \
> wrote: On Sunday June 20 2021 20:53:55 Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> > All of the above is based on the idea that yes, we want KDE \
> > applications to work well on MacOS. I'm not sure if that's the \
> > consensus or not.
> 
> I just remembered an episode a few years back. I was discussing a Mac \
> tweak of on of the plasma components on the plasma-devel ML (could have \
> been DrKonqi, could have been the platform plugin, or ) and one of the \
> key plasma devs said something tell-tale like "I think I'm going to break \
> that, just because I can". I presume it's still easy to elicit a \
> knee-jerk reaction there by invoking the idea of supporting a relevant \
> set of KCMs on other platforms…

I think this may have been to do with DrKonqi, which was not working on Mac \
OSX and probably never had worked there.

In the second and third quarters of 2014, I was working on fixing DrKonqi \
and KCrash. The end-result of the problems was that users of KDE apps on \
Apple Mac could not report crashes to KDE developers. DrKonqi either never \
appeared on Apple Mac or died immediately or failed to reach the dialog for \
submitting a bug on bugs.kde.org. Hence very few bug reports were reaching \
KDE developers from Apple Mac, even though there were lots of bugs in the \
KDE code for Apple Mac.

You may have visited the Plasma devs about this, René. During the \
transition from KDE 4 to KF5, they unilaterally decided to move the source \
code of DrKonqi from KDE 4's kde-runtime to somewhere in the KF5 Plasma \
source-code tree, thus making it more-or-less inaccessible for porting to \
other platforms. I hope it has been returned to somewhere more suitable \
now.

@Aleix: I believe you and Aaron Seigo may have corresponded with René and \
me about this. Your names also appear in the reviews on Reviewboard of my \
bug-fixes for DrKonqi.

Cut to the chase… https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/2014-October/084208.html, \
"Review Request 120431: Fix and future-proof Dr Konqi security methods on \
Bugzilla", is a thread extracted from Reviewboard. In July 2014, Bugzilla \
changed to its version 4.4.5 on bugs.kde.org. At one stroke, this crippled \
DrKonqi on all platforms and in all versions of KDE source code: KDE 4 and \
KF5, on Linux, Windows and Apple OSX, because the method of validating \
DrKonqi's access to bugs.kde.org had changed. See also bug report \
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337742 from July 2014.

With a little help from Ben Cooksley, I had been able to develop a patch \
for DrKonqi that would retrieve and test the version number of Bugzilla and \
then use the connection protocol required by that version. The patch was \
also written so as to be forward-portable to KF5's DrKonqi, with one or two \
changes of line numbers.

I had tested the patch thoroughly on Apple OSX, using a test database for \
bugs.kde.org, provided by Ben Cooksley.

Now read the review. I get nit-picked to death! No way I wanted to try and \
work with those guys any more after that.

In the review, it is only when the realisation dawns on KDE people that KF5 \
will-be/is-already failing that I get some serious reaction. But still not \
much action. In the end, I had to threaten to do my own "Ship It", to be \
sure to get the fix into the next bug-fix release of KDE 4, which was just \
a day or two away. But then Albert Astals Cid released the change for me, \
with just a few hours to spare, and someone else forward-ported the same \
change into KF5, as I had designed it to happen.

I also had had two earlier reviews, of patches to correct the many bugs in \
the Apple OSX implementation of DrKonqi and Crash, and had similar \
experiences. At least one of those bugs also applied to Linux, Windows, KDE \
4 and KF5.

Then the above-mentioned bug report dragged on till after Christmas 2014, \
because of another bug that appeared only in LINUX versions of DrKonqi \
after Bugzilla changed versions in July 2014. It was fun trying to debug \
THAT on Apple OSX, I DON'T think! I had to get end-users to generate logs \
for me. Again there was almost no help from KDE core developers, but at \
least they did forward-port my fix for that problem into KF5 again.

@Aleix: Good luck with your talk and everything… :-)

Cheers,
Ian W.


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