Sitting back waiting for a bunch of KDE 4.1.3 packages to compile. After bumping the basics to the latest release of KDE4, I re-did the dependency graph showing what we’ve ported and what is actually used (warning: it’s only 209K, but expands to 6600x2200 pixels, which may be a bit much for some viewers). Blue is the actually interesting stuff, while orange is our ported-but-unused tree. Lots of stuff in there. Some of these are optional dependencies we’ve forgotted to add to some of the packages – consider pciutils, for instance. Enabling optional dependencies is like opening a can of worms. Sometimes there’s nice tasty earthworms and sometimes a sandworm pops out and devours you.

I may have said so before, but the PCI information part of KInfoCenter is one of those sandworms full of gcc-isms and general ickiness. I still can’t think of a good clean way of decoding binary blobs though, but having to re-create a few hundred lines of patch with each minor change to the upstream source is enough to convince me now to push some patches into KDE SVN.

In the mean time, KDEadmin and KDEnetwork have been added as well. This means that besides a fairly straightforward vanilla KDE4 desktop shell you can get some of the useful applications as well. I’m still sorely missing Konversation in our mix, but the rest of the bits I need regularly are there. I could come up with a whole list of other useful KDE4 applications – RSIbreak, Lancelot – all of which I can’t get to compile yet, so I can’t claim we have a complete KDE4 for OpenSolaris, but it’s “there enough.”

What we haven’t really gotten around to is integrating KDE4 functionality with the rest of the system. Things like getting the chance to shutdown the system on logout – GNOME will allow this, presumably with checks in case you’re doing this on a server hosting several hundred users. Edward has started filing bugs in KDE bugzilla for features and functionality and just plain crashes; this is largely a way of reminding ourselves (the KDE4-Solaris community) to look at them at some time.

As for OpenSolaris 2008.11, that will drop any day now, and then we’ll roll down downloadable (but not IPS) packages for KDE4 on it. It might not be OpenSUSE; more like FreeBSD in the sense that you get the un-hacked pristine (as far as possible) upstream KDE 4.1.3.