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Tribulations of a packager (2)
Just because the source code isn’t all delivered in a tidy bundle to my doorstep with a thank-you note attached, doesn’t mean that I won’t try stuff out. Thanks to Christoph and Holger for explaining some of the WebKit things to me. In the course of today the KDE4-OpenSolaris folks updated the soprano packages, phonon (from an SVN checkout), and futzed around sufficiently that you should be able to build the Essential KDE Desktop (I don’t know where that fits in the new branding: it’s konsole, konqueror, kmail, plus integration with GDM so you can actually log in). As always, the specfiles and patches can be found in the Mercurial repo.
We still have 21 open bugreports against KDE trunk with patches attached (these are the same as patches in that repo, only reported upstream). That’s still a bunch to “encourage” maintainers to pick up. As a general rule, we commit trivia directly (happy constructors, const mismatches), file bugs on larger items, and try to keep the amount of unmergeable cruft to a minimum. I wrote some such cruft today for Dolphin, where apparently ? (some const KFileItemList method) : KFileItemList() << item isn’t acceptable. Sun Studio is particularly picky about types in the ternary operator; come to think of it a const_cast might have done the trick as well: something to experiment with later, because that would be a mergeable-trivia kind of patch.
Sometimes it’s hard to decide what flavor a patch is: today I added find_package(Boost) include_directories(Boost_INCLUDE_DIRS) to a few subdirectories in KDE PIM; that’s because Boost doesn’t live in the default compiler search path, but Akonadi’s headers #include them — so anything using Akonadi must also have the Boost include dirs in its include search path, which wasn’t the case. It’s a minor change, but it doesn’t scream “trivial” to me, so it’s sitting in our repo as “unmergeable cruft” for now.
All that said, that part of KDE SC 4.3.77 that I’ve gotten up and running is really nice; I’ve said it before, but the stuff integrates really well, including the GNOME network manager and notifications done by the pkgbuild tools when I’m building new stuff and the device manager; there’s still plenty to work on as well, but on the whole it pebbles (a small way to rock). Now if only I could start konqueror or dolphin from the menu or krunner — must be some weird crash going on behind the scenes when there’s no tty output. [[ And as a final shot, I should add that Konqueror is almost infinitely better with WordPress now than it was in 4.3.0. ]]