Hi Ryan, Thank you very much for your reply.
> On 9 Sep 2022, at 1:44 pm, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Aug 30, 2022, at 20:57, Ian Wadham wrote: >> >> I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro with Monterey O/S and installed >> MacPorts on it from scratch. >> >> I installed the qt4-mac port successfully, but kdelibs4 refused to install >> because the qt4-mac port did >> not support arm64 architecture and i am on an Apple Silicon arm64 machine. >> >> The problem arose because the installation process for qt4-mac included the >> steps: >> >> —> Attempting to fetch qt4-mac-4.8.7_13.darwin_21.x86_64.tbz from >> https://packages.macports.org/qt4-mac >> —> Attempting to fetch qt4-mac-4.8.7_13.darwin_21.x86_64.tbz.rmd160 from >> https://packages.macports.org/qt4-mac >> >> The second step succeeded, i.e. MacPorts itself downloaded an inappropriate >> package for an Apple >> Silicon machine. I noticed that some (maybe not all) of qt4-mac’s >> dependencies were compiled or >> downloaded as arm64 code and, curiously, some of Qt4’s utility apps work on >> my machine, perhaps >> due to the Rosetta emulator stepping in and taking over. >> >> The kdelibs4 install failed in the “Computing dependencies…” step, saying >> “Error: Cannot install kdelibs4 for >> the arch arm64 because its dependency qt4-mac only supports the archs ‘ppc >> ppc64 i386 x86_64’” >> >> Is this a bug or is it the end of the line for kdelibs4 on arch64? Can >> kdelibs4 really build as arch64? And what >> about its (enormous) list of other dependencies? Do they all build for >> arch64? >> >> If there is a bug here, I think it is that MacPorts can download a package >> for an inappropriate architecture. > > MacPorts correctly installed qt4-mac for x86_64 on your machine because > qt4-mac does not support arm64. The x86_64 qt4-mac will work on your arm64 > Mac via Rosetta 2 dynamic translation. > > kdelibs4, and all other ports that use qt4-mac, need to be declared to be > arm64-incompatible, due to qt4-mac's arm64 incompatibility. > > See https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65765 > Even if someone can get kdelibs4 and qt4-mac to play nicely together on arm64 Apple Silicon architecture, using Rosetta, I don’t hold out much hope for kdelibs4’s other dependencies, which are numerous and complex and quite huge. They are one reason why the KDE team switched to a radically different library organisation called Frameworks or KF5, based on Qt5. I think most of the KDE apps have been ported and are up-to-date on KF5 and Qt5 and installable in Linux and Windows. But availability on Mac appears to be a grey area (pace Homebrew). The KDE4 versions of the apps still work quite well on MacPorts on an x86_64 machine, although KMyMoney4 no longer works for me on my older MacBook (2017 vintage). Cheers, Ian Wadham.
