First Time Building( and Launching) Calligra Suite on OS X

First this post is not a guide to build Calligra Suite on Mac OS X. However, it is for programmers who are interested in porting good free software to different platforms. Although most part of this suite is still under heavy development, one application, Krita, is really in good quality. If you are not satified in this image manipulation program, or you would like to paint your creative digital drawings with free software, you may give Krita a chance.

Unfortunately this suite has not been packaged by the team and this post is talking about the Mac OS port. Thus I’d like to share my porting experience and some patches needed to build the Calligra 2.4.3 Release on a late-2011 MBP with latest 10.7.4 OS X patch and using Clang compiler provided by Apple’s XCode in (the default) 64bit mode. These patches are very likely also adaptable for other platforms.

Preparation

I use MacPorts for my package management, so for other package management system users, searching similiar names and/or reading the description are good start point.

Fortunately Offical guide for building on Unix and similars is nearly 100% correct procedure on my platform. Only some notes need to be added.

In the preparation section, just follow what recommended setup subsection said and get the source code(This is what I used: calligra-2.4.3.tar.bz2, the latest release)

BUILD/RUNTIME REQUIREMENTS

The second section is about build/runtime requirements. This part is mainly about searching and description reading. The required kdelibs and kdebase/runtime, as in updated macports, is:

kdelibs4 kde4-runtime

Just install these two may give you a minimal develop environment for calligra(other packages will be likely to be also installed by the dependency chain). We can check it, for example, if we want to know required lcms installed or not, just type(Of course we should know the correct package name)

port installed lcms

The procedure of installing these requirement may be very long if starting from a fresh macports install. In some case macports ships broken packages, which may be fixed easily or really difficult to solve. The KDE4 shipped by macports hadn’t worked for a long time but finally this time it works. After installation I looked at the patches and found a workaround for a crash.

For me, since I used Qt 4 for a long time, this procedure was not quite long but took hours. Most unacceptable part is the fetching and building process of a object relational database server, which is required by the KDE desktop search feature(Oh, I do not want a second spotlight…)

Then install required packages for some of the applications. I want to build all the applications, so I managed it using MacPorts(some of which have been installed, happy installing:) ). After that, the guide instructs us to use cmake to config the suite, and see what is not available.

BUILDING

(I’m using Qt 4.8.2, so bug mentioned in the guide does not hurt me)

Now adjust the cmake command line provided by the offical guide and configure again and again :)

I think I have shared most configure-time issues here. Then type make, …mmm…error occurs.

PATCH

This section is about some errors and patches during the build. I am very sad some important error are triggered at link time, not compile time. For immediate use, I posted the patch at this gist See also launching for ‘quick test’ results.

  1. A typo in calligra-2.4.3/kexi/kexiutils/utils.h, this can be fixed
diff -r -u calligra-2.4.3.orig/kexi/kexiutils/utils.h calligra-2.4.3/kexi/kexiutils/utils.h
--- calligra-2.4.3.orig/kexi/kexiutils/utils.h  2012-06-26 12:21:31.000000000 +0800
+++ calligra-2.4.3/kexi/kexiutils/utils.h       2012-07-16 16:34:08.000000000 +0800
@@ -537,7 +537,7 @@
     typename QHash<Key, T>::iterator insertMulti(const Key& key, const T& value) {
         return QHash<Key, T>::insertMulti(key.toLower(), value);
     }
-    const Key key(const T& value, const Key& defaultKey) const {
+    const Key key(const T& value, const Key& key) const {
         return QHash<Key, T>::key(value, key.toLower());
     }
     int remove(const Key& key) {

  1. In calligra-2.4.3/plan/plugins/schedulers/rcps/libs/, many files include malloc.h, which is not available on OS X. I just changed these to stdlib.h, everything works fine. Is there anything other than malloc called?

  2. link time error about module wpgimport. After investigating cmake/modules/FindWPG.cmake, I decided to

diff -r -u calligra-2.4.3.orig/filters/karbon/wpg/CMakeLists.txt calligra-2.4.3/filters/karbon/wpg/CMakeLists.txt
--- calligra-2.4.3.orig/filters/karbon/wpg/CMakeLists.txt       2012-06-26 12:18:00.000000000 +0800
+++ calligra-2.4.3/filters/karbon/wpg/CMakeLists.txt    2012-07-16 18:51:31.000000000 +0800
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
    
 kde4_add_plugin(wpgimport ${wpgimport_PART_SRCS})
    
-target_link_libraries(wpgimport komain ${LIBWPG_LIBRARIES} ${LIBWPG_STREAM_LIBRARIES} ${WPD_LIBRARIES})
+target_link_libraries(wpgimport komain ${LIBWPG_LIBRARIES} ${LIBWPG_STREAM_LIBRARY} ${WPD_LIBRARIES})
    
 install(TARGETS wpgimport DESTINATION ${PLUGIN_INSTALL_DIR})
 install(FILES karbon_wpg_import.desktop DESTINATION ${SERVICES_INSTALL_DIR})
It fixed the problem but I'm not quite sure about this, since in `cmake/modules/FindWPG.cmake`

    SET(LIBWPG_LIBRARIES ${LIBWPG_LIBRARY} ${LIBWPG_STREAM_LIBRARY})

This line not working as it is?
  1. Link time error about module excelimport, excelexport and excelimporttodoc filters. This problem is somewhat hard to find. The linker says undefined reference to QSharedPointer::deref, but where does the code call it? May be the assignment operator – In filters/sheets/excel/sidewinder/objects.cpp
void OfficeArtObject::setText(const TxORecord &text)
{
    m_text = text;
}
Since when compiling lots of warning flushed the screen I removed compiled object files related to this module and  made clang++ to compile them again. Oh! yes, the clang compiler correctly warned: `call delete to an incomplete type QTextDocument`. I still had to find why link-time error occurred. Finally I realized this behavior was related to the treatment to `(static) inline` of the clang compiler. Look at `QSharedPointer`, `deref` method  and related are inlined. 

Thanks to the clang compiler, I got this patch.

diff -r -u calligra-2.4.3.orig/filters/sheets/excel/sidewinder/excel.h calligra-2.4.3/filters/sheets/excel/sidewinder/excel.h
--- calligra-2.4.3.orig/filters/sheets/excel/sidewinder/excel.h 2012-06-26 12:18:00.000000000 +0800
+++ calligra-2.4.3/filters/sheets/excel/sidewinder/excel.h      2012-07-16 19:24:19.000000000 +0800
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
 #include "ODrawToOdf.h"
 #include "pictures.h"

-class QTextDocument;
+#include <QTextDocument>

 namespace Swinder
 {

LAUNCHING

Before launching, dbus should be loaded, macports issues a note about launching dbus after your every KDE4 package installation. For example,

launch load -wF /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

This (permanently) enables starting dbus after login.

Now pay attention to the directory structure, applications are installed in /Applications/KDE4/ as Mac OS X native app, and also $KDEHOME changes from $HOME/.kde to $HOME/Library/Preferences/KDE/. Besides these, the official guide’s Running Calligra applications section works. For most Mac users, being able to click the app to run the applications is really favorable.

Now I can run Krita. Yes, Krita works fine. After several minutes testing about the whole suite (only first glance really):

Also Krita says it cannot get my physical memory size and use 1GiB, though I can fix this issue but I just don’t want to do this since currently I don’t have much memory for this app…(hint: sysctl hw.memsize)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Sorry for my long article and poor markdown skill. Feel free to comment. Names or trademarks are owned by coresponding author(s)/orgnazition(s). Use of these names with best regards and wishes.

Yuuko PrZhu 18 July 2012
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