[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

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
[Download RAW message or body]

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.


[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]