The long and winding road to DigiKam (1.0 rc)

[Vlado Plaga]

The following text was originally written as a private message to Ryan
Schmidt, but he said it might be interesting for the rest of the
MacPorts users community as well. So here it comes (with only minor
modifications):

I had a few problems installing "digikam-devel", but it is working now!

First there was a problem activating "qt4-mac", but I did not record
the exact output. Just repeating the "port install digikam-devel" did
the job. So never mind that.

Second I encountered a checksum error, which is a known issue (albeit
supposed to be fixed, but maybe more could be done?):
http://trac.macports.org/ticket/21144

Finally I had a problem with my case-sensitive file-system - again!
Because of my own bug report the Portfile for kdegraphics4-4.2.4 was
modified five months back: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20313
Now with kdegraphics4-4.3.4 I have the reverse problem: the Portfile
says "QTCrypto", but the directory on my hard disk is called
"QtCrypto". Ah, I see, there has been a change to qca... so let's get
kdegraphics4 changed too: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/22941

By the way: I "patched" my MacPorts to use gcc-4.2 on Leopard, the way
Ryan Schmidt advised against about 1.5 years ago:
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2008-June/005423.html
But I thought by now ports should be tested mainly with gcc-4.2 anyway,
and it seems to work.

The system I used to compile everything was a G4 PowerBook with a 1 GHz
CPU and 1 GByte RAM. I started with a fresh install of MacPorts about
two weeks ago. Total compile time was probably three of four days. It
took from Sunday to Friday (with five interruptions of different
lengths) from "port install digikam-devel" till I could actually start
DigiKam - but I did not have to spend a lot of time with the system to
get this far, about two hours maybe.

I currently just can't install gimp via MacPorts due to problems with
the "atlas" port, which gimp seems to depend upon. Other PPC users have
simillar issues, though: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/22378

With the "nouveau" Linux graphics driver for NVidia cards improving I
might switch back to Linux as my main operating system some time next
year, but for the months to come I'll continue being a MacPorts user.

Regards,
Vlado