Yesterday I managed to build KStars from the git source too. It worked quite well after some tweaks, I didn't look into the icons however.
Today I did a git pull and building fails with this error:

[ 60%] Building CXX object kstars/CMakeFiles/KStarsLib.dir/tools/modcalcplanets.cpp.o
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/tools/modcalcplanets.cpp:18:
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/tools/modcalcplanets.h:23:
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars-build/kstars/ui_modcalcplanets.h:36:
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/widgets/dmsbox.h:25:
/Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/auxiliary/dms.h:49:7: warning: 'dms' has
virtual functions but non-virtual destructor [-Wnon-virtual-dtor]
class dms {
^
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/tools/modcalcplanets.cpp:25:
In file included from /Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/auxiliary/geolocation.h:25:
/Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/auxiliary/cachingdms.h:32:7: warning:
'CachingDms' has virtual functions but non-virtual destructor
[-Wnon-virtual-dtor]
class CachingDms : public dms {
^
/Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/tools/modcalcplanets.cpp:364:36: error: use
of overloaded operator '+' is ambiguous (with operand types 'dms' and
'CachingDms')
CachingDms LST = edt.gst() + longB;
~~~~~~~~~ ^ ~~~~~
/Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/auxiliary/dms.h:387:12: note: candidate
function
inline dms operator + (dms a, dms b) {
^
/Users/adam/Projects/kstars/kstars/auxiliary/cachingdms.h:234:23: note:
candidate function
friend CachingDms operator +(const CachingDms &, const CachingDms &);
^
2 warnings and 1 error generated.
make[2]: *** [kstars/CMakeFiles/KStarsLib.dir/tools/modcalcplanets.cpp.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [kstars/CMakeFiles/KStarsLib.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

Did you do the cmake using the output as an xcode project or did you just try to build it? I made it an xcode project so I could see what is going on and edit some code if needed. I can check to see if I have those functions in my code. It is always possible that something has been changed since I downloaded it.

Yes, I tried both and cleaned everything in between. Maybe it is a bug since it seems there were some changes recently concerning the functions the error message mentions.

Yes, it could be, because I did not even see "cachingDMS" anywhere in the sourcecode of the version I downloaded a couple of days ago.

That was a recent addition by Akarsh, I informed him of the error.

Tonight I had another success. I had been struggling with the fact that I couldn't get icons to work with the fromTheme method on OS X, since I couldn't get it to recognize the themes I installed, no matter what I tried. My solution was to use the fallback method, which works great most of the time, but then I ran into a problem. When I tried to fix the icons on the DatePicker, I realized I couldn't get access to the buttons to put icons on them, and since it was using the fromTheme method with no fallback, I had only a couple of options, create my own DatePicker or get Themes working. I tried the former, first, but gave up and tried the latter. I finally managed to create my own themes and bundle them in kstars specifying all of the files in the theme in the qrc file and providing a really basic index.theme file. Then I had just one line of code to add to KStarsInit so that if it doesn't detect a theme, to use one of my bundled themes.

On the plus side the date picker now has icons. On the minus side, I spent several days writing code for fallback icons so that I wouldn't have to use the fromTheme method because it didn't work. Well now it works. So. . .yeah. I think it might still be a good idea to have the fallback method for loading icons, however, because if we had trouble with it before, trouble could happen again. I will ponder this however, because the code is simpler with the new method.

On another plus side, you could bundle more than one theme and the user could then select their own theme! Since the themes I made are custom themes containing a minimum of icons, more themes would take up very little space. I made 2, oxygen and breeze, just to see how they looked. The entire oxygen set that we need is less than 300 kb and the entire breeze set that we need is less than 100 kb.

Oh, here is what the breeze icon theme looks like on OS X. I didn't find all the icons yet, so a couple of them are oxygen (since I made those the fallback)

That looks fantastic!!!! Please send me a pull request (or patch) for the theme inclusion and change. Great work Rob!

BTW: I just pushed a commit to fix the CachingDms build bug. Thanks for pointing it out. Please see if you can now build.

Regards
Akarsh

Ok sounds good. I should be able to do that after work today after I finish tracking down the last couple of icons. I will leave oxygen as the theme for now with breeze commented out so all you would need to do to switch would be to comment out oxygen and uncomment breeze. Oxygen looks better for now, but others have potential. I think it would be neat if that were a setting in the preferences. Once you guys see how I did it you can see what you think of that idea.

So I finished tracking down and solving as many of the icons problems as possible. My patch is complete and sent to Jasem via email. It should fix all the icon issues that I found on OS X and on some Linux distros. The icons should still work even with no theme installed. I also built in two modified custom themes based on both oxygen and breeze, but I set it so that it should load the oxygen icons. We might want to make that user configurable. I could also add more possible themes, which could be interesting.

Here are 3 comparisons of the two themes I implemented

for anybody who is following along, I worked with Jasem to get my changes merged and now he is currently working on it. We decided to go with the a fallback theme of Breeze on OS X and other OSes without themes working.