KDE-FreeBSD in 2019

December 30, 2019

The KDE-FreeBSD website did not update much in 2019.

It updated in one important way, though: it switched from a PHP-and-Capacity backend to a Jekyll-and-Markdown backend, which makes it match the rest of the KDE community websites (those that are not wiki’s). Special thanks to Carl Schwan for making that happen.

The important-but-changeable information remains on the community wiki.

CMake updates in 2019

CMake was updates to 3.13, 3.14, 3.15 and 3.16 lands in early january 2020. There were several patch-release updates to CMake.

Each CMake update brings with it an exp-run and thousands of packages being re-built. The KDE-FreeBSD team tries to fix fallout directly before committing the new CMake version.

Qt updates in 2019

Qt updated to 5.12.0, 5.12.1, 5.12.2, 5.13.0 and 5.13.2 in the course of the year. We received important contributions from Kai Knobich to bring Qt WebEngine up-to-date again, and from Piotr Kubaj for PowerPC compatibility.

KDE updates in 2019

The KDE Frameworks are a collection of 80-or-so lightweight modular libraries built on top of Qt, licensed under the LGPL. They follow a monthly release cadence, so there were plenty of updates during the year. KDE Frameworks are CI-tested by the KDE community on FreeBSD, so those updates are generally low-impact.

Plasma Desktop releases bug-fixes every month, and new releases every quarter. All of these releases were pushed to ports in short order.

KDE Applications – now the KDE release service, which provides libraries and applications following a regular schedule – updates regularly as well. There were a few surprises in the course of the year, but most of the updates were low-impact.

Outside of the KDE release service, Krita and Digikam and kdenlive and KDevelop were updated with each release and are now up-to-date with upstream.