I feel like I should blog about something but have nothing particularly compelling to say. As that's never stopped me before, and for no other reason than it's the end of the month and my sidebar tell me I have no entries for May, I'll do it anyway. Time to retreat to the good ol' standard then: Bitch, bitch, moan. You were warned.

First off KDE/Mac stuff. Benjy's back! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. That means I can have KDE ports languish in the Macports repo and not feel guilty about it. Not that I would but you get the idea. So yes, for the three of you using macports, I have seem them and am actively ignoring them. Well, not really.

The problem is that since someone decided to remove the 4.2.0 tarballs, Macports downloads html 404 pages in their place. The suggested solution of using 4.2.2 tarballs was tried but then I couldn't get kdelibs to compile on my machine. It is entirely possible that there is something wrong with my build env setup. Again. But since Amarok works now I'm not touching thing until absolutely necessary. The rest of you suffer. }:-)

Speaking of Amarok I finally figured out how to get qtscriptgenerator to build AND install properly. Hint #1: $QTDIR needs to be set. Hint #2 installing is really you manually copying the necessary files to the correct location. The mighty qmake isn't capable of doing this for you apparently, but enough snide comments. That was my first problem with creating a qtscriptgenerator Portfile. The other stems from the number of Qt4 ports available. There are currently three (eventually just two) versions of Qt4 in macports (I'm responsible for the new ones).

I wanted qtscriptgenerator to install to the correct one depending on which was activated (installed and being used in macports speak). Eventually I decided to set a variable in the kde4 portgroup that says which Qt to use, and have qtscriptgenerator use that. The first part is complete in my local macports checkout but the qtscriptgenerator Portfile has yet to surface. I suppose I'll get to it once I figure out how to set environment variables in macports (and thus be able to set $QTDIR).

Anyways, qtscriptgenerator can't just be copied to one directory, it has to depend on the version of Qt4 available at install time. The problem this poses is that if someone switches to another version of Qt (e.g. me testing out qt-kinetic integrated build, or me testing out a qt-copy version) then I want my amarok to still work, which won't happen with the current disable/enable ports setup. I'll probably change my qt4-kde port to use the same directories as the normal qt4 port. This would prevent both from being active at the same time but simplify my life. Need to talk to the other qt4 maintainer before I do that though.

As for actually fixing exisiting issues in Macports in a timely manner, don't expect much from me. School ends sometime in June (yeah, I'm there again) and until that happens I'm doing nothing more than dedicating a few hours each weekend to getting things I'm interested in working.

Which brings us to my net topic! Guess I did have things to say after all. I went and bought a new HD for the lappy and now have a Tiger partition again. Unfortunately universal compilation on 10.4 with Macports is broken. After undoing the change which led to this things were fine; until I tried to compile db46 (for subversion). And that's where that little adventure ended. In slightly related news, the apple-gcc42-devel portfile compiles on 10.4. Eventually I'll be able to see if it compiles stuff too :-)

Second off, as I've alluded to I'm back in school again. I applied to the Master's program here and was accepted. I was kinda scared I wouldn't be able to pull off working full time and going to school full time. It turned out to not be so hard once I just ditched all the computer stuff. No more MLs or IRC, except for some exceptions. My withdrawal will only become more pronounced as I get further into the program as I'd like to be done in a year. Boon for some of you, bane for others.Oh well.

Summer is coming which will free up some time to look into some issues above. I'm not particularly compelled to update all those portfiles again only to have them disappear from the mirror when 4.3.0 comes out though. They may just languish until 4.3.0 is released. I may even be able to help M. Arthur with the "Great CPackaging" which I'd myself promised months before.