Gosh, second octant already! Well, let’s take a look at the big things that happened in KDE-on-FreeBSD in these six-and-a-half weeks.

KDE Bits

  • KDE Frameworks 5.79 landed, with a hotfix for DNSSD right after. The mailing list for distributions does good work here, allowing upstream KDE to quickly notify downstreams of import bugfixes. Then KDE Frameworks 5.80 landed, one month later right on schedule.
  • The plasma-pass .. um .. Plasmoid was updated: this is a convenience UI front-end to the pass .. um .. password manager. First released in 2018 by Dan it now supports One-Time Passwords as well.
  • See the stars (and Mars, in case you can’t get any close-up photos) with astro/kstars. Welcome graphics/kgeotag to help locate where your own photos have been taken (not on Mars). Use the latest KDE NeoChat to tell people about them! Or calindori to keep track of your appointments. Kongress, the conference-attendance-helper, was had a new release (it does online conferences too).
  • Qt got some infrastructure updates so that installed Qt packages now keep qconfig-modules.h tidy.
  • Qt WebEngine and its Python2 dependency during the build is an elephant in the room. Python2 is slated for removal, and that would take most of the KDE web-related things with it. A FreeBSD with only Firefox as a possible browser is one possible future. Work proceeds on the ugly mess that is Google’s build system.
  • For Pythonistas, PyQt was updated to the latest 5.15.3, along with qscintilla and py-qtbuilder. And then 5.15.4 – Loïc chases this closely.
  • There is some gentle work on Qt6 ports, although they are not ready to land in the main ports tree yet. The KDE-FreeBSD ports tree has a branch for qt6, where lbart@ mostly keeps the fires warm.
  • KDE Release Service – all the things that use one release schedule, applications and libraries and tidbits – 20.12.3 landed its monthly update of “all the KDE bits released together”.
  • KDE’s KWin now uses xwayland-devel in FreeBSD ports / packaging. We see this as a temporary measure while Wayland support on FreeBSD is being thrashed out (for now, use KDE applications with Sway or some other compositor).

Not-KDE Bits

  • KSnip and KImageAnnotator were updated, twice; these are snugly nestled between Qt and KDE code and are close friends. Similarly, Kraft (a small-business management application), was updated to the latest release.
  • cmake was updated to 3.19.5, and then updated some more to support native FreeBSD packaging with a recent version of libpkg. And then cmake 3.19.6, and in the meantime there’s a couple of things being upstreamed.
  • vlc got an update with fixes that mostly seem to apply to other platforms.
  • GNOME updates in their 3.38 lifecycle landed in fits and starts.
  • libproxy was updated; this affects applications that use it to configure proxy-to-the-internet behavior. Fixes some security issues. Also dropped libproxy-mozjs because there’s no stable API for it to work with.
  • Golddig – aka Broderbund’s Lode Runner – was resurrected, in case you need a late-90s pure-Xlib version of the game. You may prefer kgoldrunner instead for a slightly more modern take.
  • Also oldie-but-goodie, multi-player Angband was updated, for those that prefer the roguelike approach.
  • ABI-consistency checking tools devel/abi-compliance-checker and devel/libabigail were updated; this can help track things like the interoperability of KDE Frameworks.
  • net-im/qxmpp-qt5 was updated (and supports Qt6 already!)
  • graphics/poppler had a new release with plenty of fixes (and Qt6)
  • deskutils/semantic got a refresh, as did net-im/kaidan