I have actually more than one macports installation on my iMac, which allows for switching between them, or to have different software collections grouped together. This enables me to have kmm 1.0.5 + KDE 3 on one installation and simultaneously KMM4.5 and KDE4.5.3 on the other one. (I also have a third one serving as a "clean slate" installation which I use to build things from scratch, i.e. with no port installed at the start, to detect missing dependencies.)

So you don't need to uninstall your current system and finally realize that KMM 4.5 is not *yet* what you want.

If you need more support, read the MacPorts Guide section 2.3.4 on how to set up an additional MacPorts installation on your machine. It's not that much of a problem, actually, if you are not afraid of a shell.

An important thing is then to properly set the environment variables. I do this by these settings in my .alias:

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alias AAA='PORTPREFIX=/opt/macports-test; source ~/.profile; echo $PATH'
alias SSS='unset PORTPREFIX; source ~/.profile; echo $PATH'
alias CCC='PORTPREFIX=/opt/clean-slate; source ~/.profile; echo $PATH'


SSS stands for my standard system, AAA is the alternative having KDE4 installed and CCC is the clean-slate. Typing in one of these 3-letter-command-aliases switches installations in a blink.

The .profile script contains the important stuff for the environment settings (courtesy of Brad Giesbrecht):

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if [ -z "${OLDPATH}" ]; then
   export OLDPATH=$PATH
fi
if [ -z "${OLDMANPATH}" ]; then
   export OLDMANPATH=$MANPATH
fi
if [ -z "${PORTPREFIX}" ]; then
   export PORTPREFIX=/opt/local
   export PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '
elif [ "x${PORTPREFIX}" == "x/opt/macports-test" ]; then
   export PS1='[ MP-devel ] :\W \u\$ '
elif [ "x${PORTPREFIX}" == "x/opt/clean-slate" ]; then
   export PS1='[ MP-clean-slate ] :\W \u\$ '
else
   export PS1='[ MP-??? ] :\W \u\$ '
fi
export PATH=~/bin:$PORTPREFIX/bin:$PORTPREFIX/sbin:$OLDPATH
export MANPATH=$PORTPREFIX/share/man:$OLDMANPATH


You can see that the most important variables are PATH and MANPATH. PS1 is manipulated to make it clear which installation you are working on.

Well, another glitch you need to now is that some ports install plist files in /Library/Lauch(Agents|Daemons)/ and would not work if a plist file of another installation is already found in those folder(s). A candidate for this is dbus, which gets installed with KDE3 as well as KDE4. I noticed that renaming didn't harm kmm 1.0.5, so that KDE4's new plist file installs fine.

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sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/kde3.org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist


I hope this helps to some extend to enable you to install KDE4.5 in parallel for testing purposes.

Let me know how it goes. Good luck!

It looks like my last post should open a new thread to invite more potential KMM 4.5 testers on Mac OS X.