When's the current generation of KDE Frameworks, Applications, and the Plasma Desktop going to be available on FreeBSD?
So I've written about KDE-on-FreeBSD quite regularly, and in fact my most-common commit to KDE's repositories recently is "adding news to the K-F site about updates". But there's an increasingly large gap between what's in the official FreeBSD ports tree and package repositories, and what's in area51. The testing repo gets regular updates, and I've got a local package server for testing. I'm sure the folks doing the real work in the testing repo have, too. But all that's not official. And sometimes there are questions about when KDE Frameworks / Plasma5 / Qt5 are going to be updated in the official repo's. Those questions also come from users of PC-BSD -- PC-BSD is developed by iXsystems, who also graciously support the area51 repository.
I don't have answers to those questions, though :(
Probably the answer is "when it's stable and usable".
On that front it'd be nice if releases slowed down at some point, for a little bit, so that we have one fixed point to get out there. On the other hand, the release of Frameworks 5.17 only took a day to hit our testing repo, so we're catching up. Plasma 5.5.1 took less than a day. Calligra has just updated as well. One thing that really holds up integration with the official ports tree is the need for backwards compatibility -- with all the other bits and pieces of FreeBSD and the ports tree. That means dealing with Qt4-versions of many applications and handling namespacing (of Qt4, but also Qt4 bindings to Python, for instance). Getting all the bits ready for peaceful co-existence is a lot of work and a lot of (re-)building.
That said, some important bits of the compatibility layers -- for instance, PyQt 5.5.1 -- have recently landed in the official ports tree, so it's not totally unlikely that we'll see KDE Frameworks 5, KDE Applications 5 and Plasma 5 Desktop (there's a metapackage called kde5
, which is a crude vernacular for installing plasma5-plasma-desktop, kf5-frameworks and a bunch of applications).