Bobulate

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.