KDE FreeBSD 2020.1

Current state-of-the-art in KDE-FreeBSD land is that we’re all up-to-date, almost. I updated sayonara and except for Quaternion I’m all set. Quaternion has a bunch of releases after 0.0.9.4 which are all tweaks on the AppImage or FlatPak versions, not on the actual application.

Zanshin was briefly removed from FreeBSD ports because the last release isn’t compatible with current KDE Frameworks and Akonadi releases, but both Debian and openSUSE have suitable patches (some from upstream) to get it working.

KDE Frameworks 5.66 were released today, and we don’t have those yet. 5.65, though, that’s in.

Along with Qt 5.13.2, KDE release service 19.12.0 (the .1 came out two days ago, also too-soon), KDE Plasma 5.17.5 (four days old), KDevelop 5.4.4. All of that is up-to-date. Looking at the KDE Planet we’re missing the latest Kdenlive (one day old) and KTimeTracker as well. Oh, and GCompris! So I suppose you could call the FreeBSD ports tree, with respect to KDE products at least, a rolling release.

For kicks, I made a VirtualBox applicance with the latest KDE stuff installed, and a working X server and SDDM login. Exported, with the full disk (the virtual disk is 16GB), it is a 8GB image (so I won’t be sharing it; probably I should zero out the disk beforehand). If you start it up, you have a complete KDE development environment – konsole, kdevelop, git, cmake, clang, the works – at your fingertips, with ZFS for snapshots so you can even just build-and-install to the system itself for testing (and then roll back if it screws up).

I think it’s under-represented, but for KDE applications development where the platform is abstracted away, where the important thing is current Qt and current KDE Frameworks, FreeBSD is a wonderful platform to work on. Packaging always delivers the development environment for that package with it. Complete tooling is installed out-of-the-box (and then ports adds clang 8.0 and clang 9.0 so you have modern and picky compilers as well). Building any KDE application is a git clone, cmake and make away. It doesn’t matter that underneath you have ZFS and a stricter POSIX-compliance model than on other systems, since the user/application level is the same.

(For the curious, the appliance is just the product of my instant-workstation script, applied to a fresh FreeBSD 12.1 installation.)

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2QHAmlg