Links:
KDE FreeBSD URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE Community FreeBSD URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD project aims to package all of the software produced by the KDE Community for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma, graphics applications, instant-messengers, a video-editing suite, as well as a tea timer and hundreds of other applications that can be used on any FreeBSD machine.

The KDE team (kde@) is part of desktop@ and x11@ as well, building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily-driver graphics-based desktop machine.

The KDE Frameworks have a monthly release cycle; KDE Plasma and the rest of KDE software run on a quarterly cycle plus monthly bugfixes. All of those releases landed in ports in a timely manner. Around KDE there are several hundred other applications with their own releases, of which notable or new ones are:

Infrastructure work improved the way Qt5 ports install- and un-install changes to the global header qconfig-modules.h. CMake releases landed with distressing regularity, and various low-level things like devel/libphonenumber and graphics/poppler were updated as needed.

The big issue in the Qt stack on FreeBSD is Qt5-WebEngine, which is based on Chromium. Like Chromium itself (upstream), it has a tangled mess of a build system based on Python 2.7. The scheduled removal of Python 2.7 and ports that depend on it is a sword looming over a large chunk of the Qt and KDE stack. Some resolution may be forthcoming in the form of WebEngine-less ports, but the real effort is in trying to get WebEngine to build with Python3.

More detailed descriptions of the updates in this quarter are available here (part 1) and here (part 2).