7 gennaio 2009

EN - digiKam, a little step more to world domination.

Some days ago i was told by a friend of mine if i knew a photo management application able to handle geographical informations INSIDE the picture files. At a first moment i laugh because of the easy answer: digiKam, obvious. Other software he found tends to match the image files to a database, and if you send/share your pictures you will lose all meta-data information...

After a second i laugh less because i recalled that he has a Mac.

MacBook Pro with Leopard inside to be more precise. And it was nearly the first time i saw a mac. So how to get digiKam there? I know KDE4 is multiplatform now thanks also to the Qt4 framework so i tried first on mac.kde.org, but nothing, then whit macports, but didn't find nothing. So said, after a couple of hours investigating around, and asking for hints on #digiKam and #KDE44-mac (irc channels on the freenode.org server) i ended up with an idea on how to obtain digiKam on my Friend's mac.

I started installing xcode, the basis for every development on mac. It comes with gcc, make and other useful stuff. Then i installed all the dependencies of KDE4 i found, being able to install even kdebase4 (4.1.85, not so old!) via macports. From here onwards i had to compile everything needed:

KDE44graphics (you NEED latest versions of libkdcraw and libkexif) libgphoto2 (the one on the macports's server was too old)

not much, really. In a Linux environments it is a matter of ~20 minutes or so. But in a brand new environment (for me) it is like you are taken by someone, blindfolded, taken to another city and told to go back home by your own.

The problem (but it's now a big advantage) is that i had to learn how macports works and then i created a local repository with one folder for every package, created a Portfile for everyone and started the build. It was nothing but straightforward. It took the entire day (next the day i received the mac, so we are on day 2) and landed with kipi-plugin compiled around midnight...

Next step was digiKam. Once i got kipi-plugins compiled i was quite confident (i had to hard-remove imageviewer, dng, and slideshow plugin that were blocking the builds) that i was at a little step to the success. But i was wrong. Another couple of hours separated me from getting digiKam on that mac because of another problem during compilation: the theme designer broke it and i had to delete any reference of id in the CMakeList.txt file (the same i did with kipi's plugins).

But it can't rain forever:



I had to do some trick to get it to build, so it is not that kind of stuff you can write an how-to on. I just hope to be able to adjust the macports's file on that system (witch i have to lend again) and produce some dmgs.

The important thing for me is to attract the attentions of a "real" packager to get a useful, easy and update, digiKam package for all the Mac users out there!

18 commenti:

Anonimo ha detto...

hey Man, Nice fiancee

Anonimo ha detto...

Great job! I'm looking forward to installing it on my Mac Mini. Are you going to provide a download link?

I would then try to provide integration with Plex (www.plexapp.com) so that you can have a nice slideshow of your digikam albums on TV.

Cheers,
Carsten

Unknown ha detto...

I'm not a packager, and my packages will be of a bad quality if i try to provide one. My intent in doing that build was to attract the attention of "professional" packagers such them at macports.org. Have a look at there every now and then in these weeks because i feel that someone there will provide good packages for it!

Jerome Powell ha detto...

I like this. If only I under stood what you just said! Great

Unknown ha detto...

@Livermost: What exactly you do not understand?

Jerome Powell ha detto...

I understand what you said, but because I'm not a coder, I have no idea how you did all this. I'll give it a go and see what kind parse errors I can understand! Great work.

Unknown ha detto...

@Livermost: You don't have to bother much. Just keep in touch with macport's guys and they will give you a lot of information on how to obtain digikam up and running on your mac (along with other kde apps)

Anonimo ha detto...

Nice article on digiKam on Mac OS! I tried to follow your instructions (omiting many steps, because the available ports are more up-to-date now, and I don't need gphoto to transfer my pictures), but my resulting digiKam does not work properly. I wrote an e-mail to the macports user mailing list. Maybe you can help?
Vlado

Unknown ha detto...

You seems to be missing dbus/kdenint4.

Try to start the command "kdeinit4" before starting digikam.
If that doesn't work try starting "dbus-launch" or anoter session of the dbus server (google is your friend). I'm pretty sure it is a dbus/kdeinit problem

Anonimo ha detto...

Hello, I'm a manager of the MacPorts project, but I don't know anything about KDE, and until someone such as yourself with KDE knowledge helps write the portfiles, they're not going to appear in MacPorts. Perhaps you could file an issue in our issue tracker and attach the portfiles you were able to create. Then we can look at them and improve them and incorporate them into MacPorts. Thanks. -Ryan Schmidt

Unknown ha detto...

Hy Ryan, i am not able to work on this anymore(The mac i used was lended from a friend) but i sent the port i was able to build digikam with to illogical-ai. He rsynced my local repo but probably he didn't find time to improve it (it needed some hack to get built correctly) Once i finish exams i will ask again for that mac and try to give a decent, usable port.

Anonimo ha detto...

Nice to finally see digiKam running natively on OS X. Since getting an iMac last year I've been hanging on, waiting for someone to produce a package - but it's starting to look as if I'll have to do it myself!

Was it actually "Cmake" for OS X or an alternative tool that you used to compile the digiKam binaries? Where did you obtain the tool and how did you configure it? (Cos I've had loads of problems installing and configuring Cmake so it will run cleanly...)

Unknown ha detto...

@Jon:
You can check with Macports.org. There's no need to compile everything from scratch yourself! With macports.org everything is downloaded and compiled automatically.

Anonimo ha detto...

Does anyone know when there will be a package in Macports.org? I cant find anything there.

thanks

Unknown ha detto...

As soon as digikam 0.10 will be released i will try to borrow again the mac book from that friend and see if i can get a macport for it...

Anonimo ha detto...

questo e' un lavoro fantastico . L'ideale sarebbe avere un binario da installare direttamente sopratutto per un incapace totale di programmazione come me.
Ciao

Matt Kowal ha detto...

Do you know of anyone providing digiKam builds for OS X? Cheers.

Unknown ha detto...

I think it will work using MacPorts, but didn't tried yes as i'm still looking for the time to build it myself... macports.org have digiKam 2.7.0 wich is not that old. You should try...