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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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