Bobulate

The -440 repository — that is KDE4-OpenSolaris-speak for “the Mercurial repository which holds the specfiles that are being developed for building KDE SC 4.4.0 once it is released” — has been bumped to beta2 now (version 4.3.85). We’re still in the process of rebuilding everything, as there are some new dependencies and the usual fixes and patches to be updated. I count 66 patches still applied; we have started pushing more of them upstream — especially the trivial ones like adding newlines to the last line of a file. Thanks to SadEagle for picking up some of the patches to KHTML again as well — they’re a little odd in that they apply to code that isn’t ever called but that needs to compile anyway.

xz: this is a new dependency, a general purpose compression library. Very straightforward build, no other dependencies — something that we should be trying to foist off on SourceJuicer as quickly as possible so as to make it available to more people.

libattica: Frederik Gladhorn (and whoever else worked on that), I salute you. No patches required, builds without even a single warning. If I’m going to be really picky, I’d point out that the files are licensed GNU LGPL 2.1 (the Lesser GPL) while the included COPYING file is the GNU LGPL 2 (the Library one). And there’s no tests for it, so while I can see it compiles, I have no idea if it works. Good job, anyway.

The status continues to be: it works. It’s kind of slow, and backtraces involving the Flash plugin are non-ASCII text, but for straightforward web browsing and KMail and konsole — my desktop — it’s in OK shape. As usual additional compile and runtime testers are encouraged to step forward.

Just a heads up that the KDE4-OpenSolaris group has now got KDE SC 4.4.0 beta 1 (version number 4.3.80) building the following components: base, pim, games and graphics. For me that’s what makes a minimal desktop. Getting Akonadi up and running was the biggest challenge, because it needed a fix down in Qt related to bit-twiddling, compiler flags related to aliasing, and mutexes. One line, but it took quite some time to hunt down and rebuild.

You can get the sources for the specfiles here, and build from source. It will take a while. If you’ve built Qt 4.6.0 previously from the repo, do remember to remove it first because of this mutex change (we still don’t have a good means of getting pkgtool to decide when to upgrade). Background information for this effort may be found on KDE Techbase.