Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help

aqsalter writes "Benjamin Reed of Fink fame is calling for help porting KDE to Mac using Qt/Mac. Interested parties should swarm the KDE-Darwin mailing list. KWrite for Mac here we come!"

Disturbing

The one thing I've never understood is the relationship between OpenDarwin and the distribution concerns. Although GNU-Darwin maintains its own fork of Darwin, it mostly functions as a distribution the way Fink does. Meaning, it is a solid addition to OS X and not its replacement. However, only Fink seems to be traveling in the same direction as OpenDarwin, as far as strategic interests are concerned.

GNU-Darwin almost seems to be hindering the entire Mac OSS unix community. It's only logical that the community should be centered around the PPC. Especially now that the G5 is on its way. This is where OpenDarwin and Fink are pouring all of their porting energy into. GNU-Darwin on the other hand has strangely abandoned the PPC in favor of x86 compatible chips. I believe the spokesman "proclus" said that they had to refuse to work with Apple over some free software issues.

This almost surreal splintering can do nothing but harm the overall effort of ported OSS software for the Mac. If we can't agree that the PPC is the heart of the Mac, than what can we agree on?

GNU-Darwin is irrelevant.

"The one thing I've never understood is the relationship between OpenDarwin and the distribution concerns."

OpenDarwin distrubute software. They call it DarwinPorts.

OpenDarwin [opendarwin.org] is a project launched in April 2001 which works towards porting BSD-style software to Darwin, and features a crown jewel of DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org]. OpenDarwin was founded by Apple, although they now have no control over the project's operation. Jordan Hubbard [slashdot.org] is one of many Apple employees closely associated with the project.

"GNU-Darwin almost seems to be hindering the entire Mac OSS unix community."

Virtually no-one in the Macintosh community cares about GNU-Darwin.

GNU-Darwin [gnu-darwin.org] is a project founded by a person that goes by the name proclus [slashdot.org]. This proclus character spends a fair majority of his time replying to valid criticism of his project on sites such as Slashdot and MacSlash [macslash.org]. Unfortunately, this time would be much better spent working on the actual GNU-Darwin project; GNU-Darwin has nothing to offer that hasn't already been done better by either OpenDarwin or Fink [sf.net].

"This almost surreal splintering can do nothing but harm the overall effort of ported OSS software for the Mac."

What splintering? GNU-Darwin is totally irrelvant.

GNU-Darwin are not even involved with Metapgk [metapkg.org], an alliance formed between DarwinPorts, Fink, and Gentoo [gentoo.org]. All the major packaging groups in the Macintosh community are part of this alliance.

"If we can't agree that the PPC is the heart of the Mac, than what can we agree on?"

That GNU-Darwin isn't going to exist much longer.

DarwinPorts is going to be a part of Panther, and OpenDarwin is assured of a bright future. Fink and Gentoo are part of Metapkg, so all porting work that OpenDarwin does will help those projects as well.

GNU-Darwin is totally insignificant, has virtually no support in the Macintosh community, and is let by someone with a warped view of reality. When it inevitably disappears, no one will care.

But....why?

I know I'm sacrificing karma on this but I'll ask the question anyway...why? Though I love linux as much as the next guy, OSX is probably the best GUI around. Why not concentrate efforts on making KDE the best GUI possible...better than OSX...before trying to port it? It'd be like Microsoft porting IIs to Linux. Who'd honestly use it?

Re:But....why?

If I understand correctly, the effort is not to port the GUI itself, but applications that use the kdelibs and arts libraries (i.e. koffice, konqueror, etc).

Re:But....why?

Didn't Apple do much of the work already, when they ported the Konquerer renderer into Safari?

Not really, what they did for Safari was basically a small library that emulates the few QT controls used in the Konqueror rendering framework - I think this library is called Quack.

Porting KDE is another beast altogether, we are not talking about a few controls and widgets. We are talking about application design frameworks. This means:

• Handle inter-application data transfers: clipboard, drag-drop, services. Both framework use different internal formats (rich text, images, sounds, urls) so you have to convert things on the fly.
• Link KDE application on OS X services for printing, file-management, filename mapping, icons, etc...
• Link KDE application settings like internationalisation, appearances, user preferences to the OS X system.
• Handle application level events and scripting - i.e make it possible for KDE application to understand apple-events like quit, open, print, but also OSAX scripting.

All those things require a tremendous amount of work.

You miss the point by a mile

You talk about KDE's extensive ability to be customized, but you take the flawed approach of thinking that people that enjoy this option use every last capability of it.

This is not true.

The point of KDE customizing is so that people that want one or two things to be a very specific way can make it that way and be happy.

Very few people customize every last thing on the desktop. But many people customize a few things, and for different people, it's different things they want changed.

You don't have to customize everything to appreciate KDE's deep and broad customizing options. All you have to do is customize a couple of GUI features in a way that other DE's don't allow, and you'll see the benefit immediately.

KDE works quite well on the Mac allready

A friend of mine has an i-book.
He got rid of the osx and installed debian.
And guess what, KDE runs fine.
No porting needed ;-)

How about

KDE for Win2k/XP? That would totally rock the house. I could have all the game playing of windows with all the nix of KDE. Then when I reboot to real nix it would look almost exactly the same.

KWrite?

KWrite for Mac here we come!"

KWrite? *yawn*

KDevelop? Woohoo!

But would it behave like a Mac app?

'cause not a single Qt app does so far

Panther and X11

I heard that Panther is going to have X11 integrated into the OS. How tight is this integration, and if I'm running an app in X11 how different does it feel? Are the main things going to be there like copy and paste with other apps? How about drag and drop?

when I go to the panther website, this is all that I see:
Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.

It would be nice to hear from someone that has the beta of panther installed that is using the this X11, (if it is available).