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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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