Bobulate

The first beta of KDE 4.6.0 has rolled around, pretty much on schedule. In the KDE4-OpenSolaris community we’ve been following closely, building trunk as much as possible and upstreaming those patches that make sense. So we’re happy to announce that for the first time there are 0-day packages available for OpenSolaris-type systems using Sun Studio (I’ve got to add that last proviso because the Belenix guys do a good job of producing packages with gcc).

The packages can be had from the 4.6.0 package repository and include Plasma Desktop Workspace, KDE sdk, Konversation and Amarok along with a bunch of other things. There’s no KDE PIM, edu or KOffice because of various compilation problems that we have not yet been able to solve or functionality issues (e.g. KMail crashes in all of its GPG handling in a way that makes me suspect a compiler bug, but I haven’t been able to track it down well enough yet). The specfiles repository from which these packages are built is available too.

Supported Platforms: the packages are currently available for x86 only. In a poll we did some time ago there was little enthusiasm for specific 64-bit packages, so we have not been building them. Anyway, the Solaris kernel can mix-and-match 32- and 64-bit applications and libraries, so there’s not much lost. There’s no SPARC packages, in spite of some recent success in getting things to build. Here’s the list of supported platforms:

• OpenSolaris build 134, x86 Edit: while the repo should build on 134, these packages will not install there because dependency names have changed.
• OpenIndiana build 147, x86

Just those two, hunh. Later builds of either should work, but have not been tested. Oracle Solaris Express 2010.11 should work (it names itself build 151) but has not been tested. Solaris 10 is not supported, as it uses a different packaging system and needs lots of other updated software.

How to get it: set your kdeips-dev publisher to the new repository URL, refresh and install. Something like this should do:

pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/pkg/4.6.0/ kdeips-dev
pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install KDEbase-apps

PS. I’d like to welcome Onno Molenkamp to the fold. He’s been doing 64-bit builds for us and tackling some long-standing annoyances (in Virtuoso and Qt) that make the build less pleasant than it might. The #kde4-solaris channel now has random bits of Dutch on it, too.

PPS. KDE4-OpenSolaris acts as an "upstream" for OpenIndiana. We’re "downstream" from the work done by the KDE community, and massage the code a little and send it off again. There is plenty of scope for cooperation, and we’ve seen recent conversations about having various parties interested in stuff to work together more effectively. (Here "stuff" is Qt and KDE frameworks as well as KDE applications and Plasma workspaces).

PPPS. Solaris 10 isn’t dead as far as we are concerned, just very much unsupported and uninteresting as a target (even if it has a decent installed base of corporate use). Some people try building our specs every now and then and we do try to avoid actively breaking stuff for S10.

PPPPS. We know not all of our patches are acceptable for upstreaming. Some actively break stuff for other systems. Those are the kind that don’t go anywhere else. Sometimes we massage things until they are acceptable. It’s a bit of a trade-off. A shout-out to the author of Sentinella, Carlos Olmedo Escobar, for contacting me about the Solaris packaging we’ve tried to do and the patches that required. I hope to have Sentinella running on OpenSolaris pretty soon.

Since Allen pointed out that the KDE PIM team had released another 4.4 version, we’ve bumped the KDEPIM version available for OpenSolaris through our KDE 4.5 series specfile repository. PIM hasn’t done a 4.5 release as such, concentrating on 4.6 and a full Akonadi-based release, so it’s good to see updates and bugfixes going on nonetheless.

You can build the software using the specfiles — we have not uploaded newer packages. That will have to wait until we’ve done a little more research into how to best serve up packages (as more people are using them now, we’re hitting various performance issues in the way we do things).

I recently mentioned that Plasma Desktop and KDE applications 4.5.2 was building. It’s done now and the repository has been put up on solaris.bionicmutton.org. This uses a Linux port of pkg.depotd, rather crudely hacked together by myself. That should ease up some package downloading issues.

So, users of KDE4 on OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana, it’s time to update. Remember to file bugs at bugs.kde.org with the OS set to Solaris, and drop by #kde4-solaris on Freenode.

PS. There was an article up on a Dutch website with “5 best things Oracle did for Open Source” and one of them was “Kill OpenSolaris”. Hm. PPS. Konqueror does crash on Flash games sites, somewhere in kjs. On the plus side, DrKonqui now produces nice stack traces with dbx.

Now that the october updates for all the software shipped by the KDE community — that is, Plasma Desktop and the applications — has been released, it’s time to bump versions, etc. and kick off a bunch of builds. This follows the tried-and-true approach of replacing the version number (i.e. it now reads ‘%define kde_src_ver 4.5.2’), running make, waiting for the pkgbuild tool to report failures, fix, rinse, repeat. Usually the things we fix are just new or removed files. In this release, for instance, KHelpCenter has a new documentationnotfound/ directory and some files there.

During this period, our so-called stable (-450) repository is not stable. Fixes to the packages get pushed as and when they are found. Once the builds are stable (i.e. a few of us have managed to get everything to build), then Hajma kicks off a clean build on our build server, waits about six hours for that to finish, then uploads the whole darn thing to the actual binary IPS package server. And then people can update as they like.

I won’t vouch for the stability of updating. We usually take the ‘pkg uninstall -r hier-kde4-deps ; pkg install KDEconsolidation’ route, which is also known as ‘log into JDS, rip out all of KDE, install a new one’. One day we hope to look at that more closely.

Our IPS package server runs in OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox on an OpenSuSE machine. There’s issues with networking in that setup; I’m a little hazy on the details but it means that downloads often crap out. There’s 1226 TCP connections in FIN_WAIT2 state right now. That’s also a sign that people are actually using Plasma desktop and KDE applications on OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana. Apparently folks are overrunning the OI IRC channel asking what’s wrong with our package server — ask in #kde4-solaris, folks.

Since the server setup has been giving us some problems, I cloned the pkg source code repository from Oracle and now have a copy available in our Mercurial repository. The purpose of the clone is to hammer the system into shape so it can run on Linux. It seems Onno M. has done something similar, to the point of producing packages of same via the OpenSuSE build service. In any case, the idea is to drop the VM and additional OS from the equation and make pkg.depotd serve packages directly from Linux. This needs some testing, but I imagine we will be switching over for serving up 4.5.2.

Finally Michael will be able to install KDE software without a week’s worth of disconnects.

[[ While I typed this story, I built the KDEsdk, KDEtoys and KDEutils packages; changes here reflect the renaming of kdesvn-build to kdesrc-build. KDEtoys has no changes, and KDEutils incorporated one of our patches from 4.5.1, so there was a patch to remove. ]]

Two last tidbits: I managed to utterly break my OSOL VBox, so I now do builds on OpenIndiana virtually and on physical hardware running OSOL. Packages are produced in OSOL b.134 and work unmodified on OI b.147 and later. The -460 repository is in the throes of a massive cleanup since the range of supported platforms has shrunk recently: it’s either Solaris10 (untested except by the hardiest of souls) or OSOL b.134 or OpenIndiana, pkgtool 1.3.102 or later. That means cleaning up tons of cruft and special-cases. Once that’s done, there looks to be a bump to Boost (to 1.44) and some Qt mucking about.

It took some wrestling, but the EBN machine is back up, with some of the VMs up and running FreeBSD 8-STABLE. I’m still repairing the EBN itself, since that has many many more packages installed that need recompiling than the other VMs. There’s also Java to deal with — it may have become superfluous on the machine, but I need to sort that out or build by hand again (due to license restrictions, you still need to fetch Java distribution sources manually).

In any case, with the server up and running again the KDE4-OpenSolaris folks could push their updates to our Mercurial Repository with specfiles (and patches) for the KDE SC 4.4 series, including dependencies. As always, this is intended to build all of the KDE packages on a recent OpenSolaris (I use 130, others use 134, and I would recommend against anything pre-124). Mark and Ben also work on supporting Solaris 10 (the stable, enterprise OS release) so you can probably build the whole thing on there as well. Both SPARC and amd64 are supported, and we do try to support 64-bit builds for all of the dependencies. KDE itself builds only in 32 bit mode, though (simply because I don’t see much point in doubling build times and having an extra copy around).

Let’s take a look at what has happened recently in the repository:

• Updated to KDE SC 4.4.3: after it was released on May 5th, 2010, it took only a day to bump the repo to 4.4.3 as well. We now tag things in the Mercurial repo a little more consistently, so you can pick releases as needed — I do think this is a little more convenient than cloning a separate repo for each minor release as we did for the 4.3 series.
• GPG Updated: updated gpg to 1.3.0, which is the latest version. This also meant updating libassuan to 2.0.0 and some other minor tweaks, but it gives us something modern again.
• icu4c updated: The Unicode consortium’s library for Unicode manipulation — needed by Boost — has been bumped to the latest version. There’s a “competing” version from Sun itself, SUNWicu4c, but that’s built against the old Cstd library so we can’t use it.
• Various administrivia: updated libattica to 0.1.3 and changed the QImageBlitz library version to 0.0.4; this was 4.2.0, matching the KDE release that it originally came with, but the library itself thinks that it is 0.0.4. Looks a bit unmaintained otherwise, and I had to go (thankfully!) to the Debian source mirrors to get a sensible source tarball.
• GNU Telephony: The dependencies for the GNU Telephony project have been imported as well. I don’t know if this is needed on OpenSolaris — it hasn’t been built for any of my KDE needs yet.

So there’s plenty of updates going on, and we’re happy to have a single source where you can type “make” and get a working KDE4 desktop on an OpenSolaris machine. Packages might be available by now, too. I’m still working on transferring the package server to an OpenSolaris VirtualBox on FreeBSD.

By tracking things more closely each minor release (of anything) becomes easier to test and integrate — I suppose I should write something about using ZFS to do that — and we can stick closer to the actual release dates. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to keep up with the Linux distro’s or FreeBSD, but we’re close.

Although KDE SC 4.4.0 isn’t officially released yet (or there’s no announcement on the dot yet), I’ve bumped the specfiles in the KDE4-OpenSolaris repository to 4.4.0 and kicked off a rebuild. That means that we should have new packages at about the same time that the major GNU/Linux distributions have them. The release candidate was pretty stable on OpenSolaris as long as you didn’t (re)build any parts of it while logged in, but we’ll probably be hearing enough bug reports in the next few months for OSOL. You can report problems to KDE’s bugzilla with the OS set to Solaris, or use the OpenSolaris bug tracker and choose one of the KDE components there.

Of course, the whole future of OSOL is a little .. fuzzy. The Oracle / Sun takeover has caused a fair amount of shake-up in many of Sun’s projects, but OSOL has not, as far as I know, been either committed-to or deprecated. We’ll see.

In the wake (er, .. the bow shock wave, since I’m getting ahead of myself) of the release, Jos asks for something offensive and the KDE website has been re-vamped. Especially the latter is impressive, for breathing new life into the somewhat moribund site. I believe the call for help still applies as the rest of the content is polished and brought up-to-date.

Some days, there’s just too much new software out there at once. Not only has a pony escaped (I met Kushal last in Bangalore), but a tiger is on the prowl (Gökmen, Negril), and KOffice (I know the last time I met Cyrille it was in a large bar, multi-storied, all wood paneling and such and Boudewijn was there as well but I have no clue what year or even what country it might have been in).