building kde4(-baseapps)

[Nicolas Pavillon]

Hello, 

> I've been making some progress, using gcc-4.2 and tweaking Portfiles where required. Lots of apps appear to be nicely functional, even, including Kate and Konsole. (I had an issue with KWrite, but since I hardly ever used it I dropped it). I should say that I built Kate, Konsole and a number of others "by hand", not using port.
I am still surprised that you have to build so much ports by hand. The ones you explicitly name built typically fine on all configurations I could test, including the build bot of 10.6, which is the same system as yours to my understanding, although the XCode version is different. The fact that you are using a custom install prefix although prevents you to use the binary distributables. 

> KMail works, except for the settings dialog, which shows an empty and very narrow left side-bar, and an otherwise empty window with just the button row on the bottom. It built without issues with the other kdepim apps, so I wonder if this is a known issue?
Several PIM applications of KDE rely on the akonadi server which must be running, but I am not sure about KMail. You can refer to “port notes akonadi” about this.  

> I had some initial luck building PyKDE4 by hand, though I'm not sure if it is functional. WHen I tried to build it again this morning with my /usr/local tree moved aside, I got stuck on hard-coded, non-conditional references to X11 that I didn't know what to do with.
What you are describing is the reason why there is no port providing PyKDE4. Due to the lack of support without X11, I gave up on trying to make a Portfile for it. 

> The same references seem to be biting me building kde4-workspace by hand. I'd like to have at least the systemsettings tool, and if I'd be curious to see how kwin works .. as an X11 window manager :)
They are indeed also issues with required dependencies on X11 on this side, which is incompatible with the use of the native qt4-mac port. This is described in the ticket 33780 (https://trac.macports.org/ticket/33780), where there are apparently patches waiting review upstream to make it work. 

Cheers, 

Nicolas