If only they switched to vcpkg from the abomination which Craft manager is... I used to do some dev work in KDE but after realizing I spent 70% of my time with that project on managing the Craft anti-pattern hell, I gave up.

KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if it's a properly licensed open source, is way better and even some GNU projects have no issue with it. Any reasonable suggestions to switch to vcpkg have been met with serious hostility, only because it's Microsoft's.

Had they used the more common, recognized tools and processes, they'd see more developer contributions, especially the one-offs, vastly speeding up bugfixing. Because nothing makes you want NOT to fix that annoying bug like spending 3-4 hours setting up your dev environment in the first place.

Oh, and do they have macOS runners available yet in their on-premises Gitlab instance?

> KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft [...] only because it's Microsoft's.

And I thank them for it. Microsoft has zero regards for the FOSS community, and forcing people to use FOSS tooling made by the FOSS ecosystem to develop FOSS makes a lot of sense to me, at the very least for the dog-feeding argument, but also because it wouldn't make sense to use tooling from a for-profit company that tried time and time to eradicate your community. I understand the avoidance by developers who been around the space for two decades or more, because we remember what Microsoft has done.

Sometimes you have to bite the sour apple in order to actually stand for your ideals, and this particular choice seems like a no brainer, at least to me.

> not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if it's a properly licensed open source, is way better and even some GNU projects have no issue with it.

For sure those are important but what actually drivers a project are accepted COMMITS and GOVERNANCE. If Microsoft puts the right license sure anybody can fork it if somehow the project goes in the wrong direction... but if most contributors are Microsoft employees doing those commits, or refusing others, what will happen? The license or how "better" the project is won't help. If KDE does not trust Microsoft (one of the largest corporations who is selling proprietary software since its inception and still do this day) then even if the "better" solution is from Microsoft then strategically KDE is right to avoid it.

I swear I've been through three or four cycles of this now, at least. Microsoft woos some noobs, who wonder why everybody is acting on edge around Microsoft. Become dependent on Microsoft, then get burned. Then new noobs come into the scene and the cycle repeats.

Can you give an example of a mainstream project that uses vcpkg? I've never run across it anywhere.

Who needs vcpkg when you already have a built in package manager?

If it’s not in the distro, it’s not in the tree, then it’s built by another tool like genie or whatever. vcpkg was because windows had no such capability.

It’s decent but it’s not the best.

I mean that's C++ development in general.. even among package managers you had to deal with conan, vcpkg, hunter, and a dozen more ..

And then add to that the complexities of build systems and cross platform, cross complication headaches...

That being said, for most of kde end user applications, fixing quick little bugs is usually just installing the devel packages from your distro, git cloning the application, a couple of compile debug cycles and then sending the patch on their gitlab..

vcpkg is generally indifferent to linux.