KDE on FreeBSD - June 2018
The KDE-FreeBSD team (a half-dozen hardy individuals, with varying backgrounds and varying degrees of involvement depending on how employment is doing) has a status message in the #kde-freebsd channel on freenode. Right now it looks like this:
http://FreeBSD.kde.org | Bleeding edge http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php | Released: Qt 5.10.1, KDE SC 4.14.3, KF5 5.46.0, Applications 18.04.1, Plasma-5.12.5, Kdevelop-5.2.1, Digikam-5.9.0
It's been a while since I wrote about KDE on FreeBSD, what with Calamares and third-party software happening as well. We're better at keeping the IRC topic up-to-date than a lot of other sources of information (e.g. the FreeBSD quarterly reports, or the f.k.o website, which I'll just dash off and update after writing this).
In no particular order:
- Qt 5.10 is here, in a FrankenEngine incarnation: we still use WebEnging from Qt 5.9 because -- like I've said before -- WebEngine is such a gigantic pain in the butt to update with all the necessary patches to get it to compile.
- Our collection of downstream patches to Qt 5.10 is growing, slowly. None of them are upstreamable (e.g. libressl support) though.
- KDE Frameworks releases are generally pushed to ports within a week or two of release. Actually, now that there is a bigger stack of KDE software in FreeBSD ports the updates take longer because we have to do exp-runs.
- Similarly, Applications and Plasma releases are reasonably up-to-date. We dodged a bullet by not jumping on Plasma 5.13 right away, I see. Tobias is the person doing almost all of the drudge-work of these updates, he deserves a pint of something in Vienna this summer.
- The freebsd.kde.org website has been slightly updated; it was terribly out-of-date.
So we're mostly-up-to-date, and mostly all packaged up and ready to go. Much of my day is spent in VMs packaged by other people, but it's good to have a full KDE developer environment outside of them as well. (PS. Gotta hand it to Tomasz for the amazing application for downloading and displaying a flamingo .. niche usecases FTW)