I really wanted to say that Krita was the first KDE Frameworks 5-based application available in the official FreeBSD ports tree (so that pkg install krita just works), but it turns out that labplot has been KF5-based for a month or more and no-one noticed.

Nonetheless, three cheers for Krita and Calligra, which have been updated to the latest, modernest versions.

This is the start of a whole flood of updates, although Plasma is still going to take a while. Several things have come together to make this update possible:

  • FreeBSD KDE CI is running, so we can keep a close(r) eye on upstream. (This is what runs in KDE's CI system, for FreeBSD)
  • KDE FreeBSD CI is running, so we can keep a close eye on ourselves. (This is what runs in FreeBSD's CI systems, for KDE)
  • Both KDE and FreeBSD have Phabricator review systems, one for changes to downstream packaging, one for changes to upstream code.
  • KDE FreeBSD ports development is happening in a GitHub fork of the official FreeBSD ports tree.

With good CI and a good review process, we've been much happier getting packaging-fixes upstream than ever before. The CI catches unpleasant changes (hey, k3b has turned red, what's up? Patches forthcoming ..) before they are released. The packaging CI is good for keeping track of where we are in packaging things ourselves. Since there's a fair amount of package-shuffling going on, that's important to have in hand. Finally the move to a git clone of the official ports tree makes it much easier to do small topic branches (e.g. updating Frameworks), test, and merge than we ever could with the SVN-based tree.

There's a handful of smaller updates in-flight, alongside the Great Big Plasma5 branch, which is now shrinking as parts of it start to show up in the official ports already.