Rob Lancaster replied to the topic 'Kstars 3.5.0 OSx' in the forum. 3 years ago

So the answer to this is slightly complicated. The sounds in KStars come from a library called Phonon (the VLC based version), which was originally supposed to be a cross platform sound system. But I found it to be incredibly hard to build the vlc backend for it on OSX. A couple of years ago, I managed to get it built after several hours of hard work, but the changes I had to make were in a number of different places in libraries owned by different people. I very carefully saved the binaries, and now in the DMG build I just copy them in from a zip file. The sounds do work just fine in the distributed version of KStars, but not in the development versions. So you might ask, why don't we just copy them in to the app bundle here, wouldn't they work here too? Well yes, it does work, I tried it, but the issue is that the phonon files I am referring to reside in the plugins in the app bundle, but since everyone is using a different version of QT, the plugins on your system might be different, so really we should be using the plugins directory from QT, not an internal plugins directory in the app bundle. There could potentially be issues or conflicts with file versions if we do that. So you might think, well what if we copied it into the plugins folder on the user's system in QT? Well I don't think I should copy files into people's QT directory from my script first, but also, the libraries in the vlc folder and the phonon backend are linked to the libraries in the app bundle. I am not sure they would work in the QT directory. Maybe with a bunch of work they could.

So it's complicated. And from my perspective, I am a volunteer working on a hobby project, this isn't my full time job, and just getting KStars to work on OS X in the first place and then to keep it working and fix all the issues that pop up is difficult enough. And this year I just decided to develop a cross platform plate solving library called StellarSolver. These things do take a lot of time, but they are really interesting and they do make a difference in the world, so I do have to pick my battles. The sound issue is not really at the top of my list. But other folks like yourself helping out would greatly help the cause and allow more of these sorts of issues along with many others to get fixed. That is one really big reason that the KStars-INDI-Mac-Dev Repo has been a priority of mine, so that I can get new folks started and helping out. Because we all benefit from this open source collaboration that we are undertaking here. Last year, I got somebody started coding on KStars and INDI using this repo and he started small and then started working on bigger projects. He is now one of our main contributors, though he did decide to move to coding for KStars on Linux because of the challenges on OS X, but he hasn't stopped, and thats the important part! I am hoping though, to get this repo to a state where it is good enough that people enjoy using it just as much.

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