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KDE Businesses GUI OS X Operating Systems Programming Apple IT Technology

Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help 60

Posted by pudge from the mmm-pie dept.
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!"
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Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help More

Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help

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  • Disturbing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by veldmon ( 595009 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:49AM (#6711044)
    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?

    • Re:Disturbing (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      proclus is, IMHO, an opportunist trying to make some bucks. And I also think that he has an undeserved ego and he project the impression that I have of him that, he think that the american dream is about being envied, and getting all the attention. Of course from the POV of the avg. stater, being does help in these ventures.

    • GNU-Darwin is irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Xenex ( 97062 ) <xenex@oNETBSDpinionstick.com minus bsd> on Saturday August 16, 2003 @03:30AM (#6711172) Journal
      "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? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:51AM (#6711050) Journal
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gdarklighter ( 666840 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @03:10AM (#6711114) Homepage
      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? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Dave114 ( 168228 )
        If I could get KMail running with MacOS X (X11 doesn't count), I'd drop Apple's Mail app in the blink of an eye.
      • Didn't Apple do much of the work already, when they ported the Konquerer renderer into Safari?

        • Re:But....why? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Matthias Wiesmann ( 221411 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @07:05AM (#6711643) Homepage Journal
          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.

          • Re:But....why? (Score:3, Informative)

            by iMacGuy ( 199233 )
            The library is actually called "KWQ", and it's a bridge between things like QString and the Cocoa stuff that does the same thing. WebKit handles the UI, I think.

            At the beginning, I think the idea is just to get the apps running on QT/Mac effectively.
            (KDE already links into OSX's printing, since that uses the open-source CUPS, although it still uses its own GUI.)

        • Re:But....why? (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          No. There's no KDE library code in KHTML. There was some QT code, unfortunately, but Apple's programmers wrote a little shim library that presents an identical interface to QT's foundation classes (strings and whatnot) to get around that. This library is now part of KHTML. So the QT dependencies are slowly being removed. That's a good thing.
    • The GUI library (Qt) is already ported, so they just need to get it in shape and then fix the K apps to no longer use direct X11 calls. Then we too can have free alternatives to Office.
    • > Who'd honestly use it?

      I would. The point is to be able to run KDE apps natively in OS X. That would be a major infusion of free software - some of which (KDevelop especially) I use extensively.

      It would lessen my need to dual-boot my Powerbook, and let me run OS X alone a lot more.

  • 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 ;-)
  • 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.
    • haha.. Right because you know KDE has so much to do with *nix. KDE is just a window manager you tool. So when you boot into your real *nix operating system, Linux I`m guessing, You will have an OS that will look the same but operate completely different. Yeah that wont be confusing. I guess its okay though because You know as well as I know that your not running any unix based OS.

    • Re:How about (Score:3, Funny)

      by dhobbit ( 152517 )
      Porting KDE to Win2k/XP is the dumbest idea I have ever heard. It's dumber then a friend of mine who clipped a 9 volt to his balls. If you want to play games buy a Game Cube. If you want to run a stable computer then use a *nix. Or better yet encourage your game maker to write that game in OpenGL so its easier to port to OSX or Linux.
      • > Or better yet encourage your game maker to write that game in OpenGL so its easier to port to OSX or Linux.

        I agree with the sentiment, but you'd have to be a fool to think the game developers are going to listen to a pathetically tiny fraction of their audience. Particularly when Direct3D has new effects and other fuckery to show off.

        • I agree with the sentiment, but you'd have to be a fool to think the game developers are going to listen to a pathetically tiny fraction of their audience. Particularly when Direct3D has new effects and other fuckery to show off.

          Newsflash - OpenGL is extensible WITHOUT releasing a new version, and they do update fairly often.

          Note that our Slashdot Lord John Carmack writes all of his engines (which many a game then proceed to license) in OpenGL. So don't tell me that OGL doesn't have new effects and fucke
    • How about the worst of both worlds? A Window manager designed mostly to emulate Windows poorly atop an operating system that actually *is* Windows. Ugh.
      • The ability to run a different window manager in Windows would be awesome. Even the ability to run a different desktop or taskbar would be great.

        Frankly, the only reason why people think Windows is easy is simply because they're used to it. The actual window manager component is lame. No snap-to's, no z-order control, no window shading. Sure, it looks pretty, but in terms of functionality, even Blackbox has it beat.

        If I could run a native (not cygwin) KDE, GNOME or Xfce under Windows, I would do it in a h
        • You can do this already

          A simple Google Search [google.com] finds a bunch of them. Some for-pay, some for-free.

          I don't use them because WinXP's taskbar acutally does everything I want it to do, and when I use Win2k at work, I can't customize it that much.

          If I could run a native (not cygwin) KDE, GNOME or Xfce under Windows, I would do it in a heartbeat.

          So would I, probably. But they're simply not ported.
    • I think your .sig answers your own question!

      Peace out.
  • KWrite for Mac here we come!"

    KWrite? *yawn*

    KDevelop? Woohoo!

  • But would it behave like a Mac app? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by anarkhos ( 209172 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @09:17PM (#6719963)
    'cause not a single Qt app does so far
  • 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 w

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