KDE 3.4 in x86?

brullonulla · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 1:16 pm Post subject:

I normally would suggest anyone has the right to complain. But in this case it seems to me someone is just bitching without any real reason to do so. Even worse, it can suggest some developer to think "oh, they want it, let's release it anyway" without some decent testing. That's not what I want.

If people are not prepared to wait a couple of months to get a package stable, well, it means those people are spoiled childs. If you want that package right now, well, just emerge ~x86. If you want it to be stable, test it (so we fall again in the above situation) or wait. I can't see what else can be done. If you feel right to complain, well, I think ppc and sparc people should be preparing for war.

Even if split ebuilds are the cause, well, if sometimes split ebuilds have been chosen (and it is right IMHO because they give Gentoo users much more flexibility... that's one of the reasons we run Gentoo, isn't it?) they have to be tested. Sooner or later this should have happened. When stable split ebuilds for XMMS came out I remember I had some tiny headache. Tiny because it was XMMS. I don't want to imagine what does it mean for KDE.
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bur · Apprentice Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 229

brullonulla put it very well, what's the problem anyway? It's not like the devs are forbidding to install 3.4, everyone is free to do so, just unmask the packages and there you go. I can't understand why anyone would switch to another distri just because of the masked builds. Do those people prefer to set up a whole new system over simply adding the needed commands to package-keywords?

So why all this complaining? If you think it's stable enough, then emerge it, if you think it's not then wait until it gets into x86. That's all.

ranmakun · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 2:11 pm Post subject:

I found this thread because I wanted to know whats happening with KDE.
Although many of you say that this is not caused by split ebuilds, it's true that this is the first time we have a delay like this. IMHO the if the monolitic KDE ebuilds build fine and work for most users they should be made stable, since it's supposed to have been tested by the KDE team. If there are real problems with the original KDE packages it will arise in the first days after it's relase as it happened once with a KDE relase that never went stable (I don't remember wich one), but if it builds ok on gentoo, I think that after 10 - 15 days it should go stable. After all, we all know that stable gentoo is not a super tested, super stable system anyway, it's just packages that seem to work well in most scenarios. I've been using KDE 3.4 monolitic ebuilds for a month now and didn't have any problems, and I mean ANY problems. It's even a lot faster for me that previous relases, so apart from updated software, users could benefit a lot by that.
If its the split ebuilds that are delaying this relase I really think they should be stay unstable and separate them from the monolithic ones, but just because it has problems with building the packages and making all of them work together. At the point the packages start to build without problems, as I said before, they should be made stable, KDE by itself has already been tested by the KDE team.

andyfraser33 · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 2:32 pm Post subject:

For anyone who's interested I've found the answer I was looking for:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86898

I'm big enough to admit that I was wrong about the reasons for KDE 3.4 being delayed although I did say "The rest of this post assumes that the delay is being caused by the meta ebuilds" in my original post. My assumptions were based on those of others, the lack of information from the devs and the difficulty of finding this sort of information in the bugs database without already knowing specifics.

This does highlight a failing within the community though. All someone had to do was post a link to the bug I linked to and I would've thanked them and shut up. Alternatively people could've read and commented on my suggestions, admittedly based on a false assumption, instead of getting defensive, resorting to insults or name calling. If someone doesn't understand my points they could ask. This is how civilised conversation and debate works in the real world. This community is second to none when it comes to offering help but falls down when it comes to civilised debate. Most on-line forums suffer from this problem though.

I'll admit that some of the words I used might seem a little strong to some people but I really do care about Gentoo. I feel more passionately about Gentoo than I ever have for any other OS. Please don't shoot me down in flames for that.
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JackDog · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 2:32 pm Post subject:

ranmakun · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 2:57 pm Post subject:

andyfraser33 · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 3:25 pm Post subject:

FastTurtle · Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:39 am Post subject:

andyfraser33: Thanks for the link since it means I should be able to go for 3.4 on my system.

IMO: Expect problems when you're running any beta version of critical software.

As to your complaint about lack of info from the devs. I have to agree. Once it was realized that this involved ~x86 and the latest version of GCC (which is still in beta afaik), they should have hard masked it until the solution came down from the GCC and kde devs especially since it appears to build fine using GCC 3.3.
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bcmm · Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 10:20 pm Post subject:

That bug was a bit confusing....

Is KDE 3.4 masked mainly because it has known serious bugs/might break completely or because it hasn't yet been tested enough to show that it doesn't have bugs?

Has anyone reading this unmasked it, and does it work OK for them?

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

I've been using it since it hit ~x86. Only problems I've had were that kasteriods crashed (the gcc hidden thing) and theres a problem with recurring events in korganizer.

bcmm · Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 9:49 am Post subject:

And how is general stablity? Have you tried the transperency features in kwin, and do they crash X like xcompmgr does?

andyfraser33 · Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 11:18 am Post subject:

assaf · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:59 am Post subject:

caleb · Developer Joined: 02 Jun 2003 Posts: 404

To chime in: the split ebuilds have *nothing* to do with why 3.4 hasn't been marked stable yet.

There's a bug report on the topic (the # escapes me at the moment), but the main reason is KDE 3.4 added support for visibility scoping within the compiler (gcc 4.0), and Gentoo has backported that to gcc 3.4, and it turns out that there is some brokenness in KDE 3.4's implementation that isn't compatible with the gcc 3.4 backport. Thus, if you happen to do things the wrong way, you could end up with a borked KDE 3.4 installation.

We believe these are sorted out for KDE 3.4.1, and it's possible they may be sorted out for 3.4.0 soon.

If you use gcc 3.3 only, then it's no problem to install KDE 3.4.x - in fact, I would consider it VERY stable. But in order to not break lots of peoples' systems, we have left it ~x86 until we get the matter resolved.

PeterZ · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 10 Location: Cordova, TN

My problem with this whole issue is the current condition of the kde portage branch. Right now just about everything is masked, being at the 3.4.1 version. What would I do if I were setting up a new box and wanted to emerge kde? Most of the apps would be masked.

Is portage not capable of having more than one version in the tree? If so, this is a major deficiency. On Saturday afternoon I did my weekly emerge --update --deep --newuse world and lost kweather. If I did that today would I lose all of the apps that are masked in today's tree? That seems like the antithesis of what portage is supposed to do.

The other big issue seems to be the definition of "stable." IMO, "stable" for the gentoo team should mean that a clean stable ebuild can be created by portage from the distros available from kde.org. The stability of the kde code itself is, again IMO, the responsibility of the kde team, not the gentoo team. If kde 3.4.1 is unstable in the eyes of the gentoo developers, then they need to tell us that kde 3.4.1 is not ready for prime time and that is why it is masked.

The idea that the gentoo team is responsible for testing every aspect of every version upgrade of every app available for Linux is, in my mind, ludicrous. If the gentoo developers don't recoil in horror at the thought of responsibility for every line of code in the Linux world, well ...

To sum it up, I believe that having kde 3.4.x masked is up to the developers. Having 3.4.x masked in the portage tree so intrepid users can test it is fine. Having no other version (i.e. 3.3.2) available via emerge for the rest of us is unacceptable.

Just my opinion.

andyfraser33 · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 6:40 pm Post subject:

scharkalvin · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 7:34 pm Post subject: Safest way to go to 3.4?

OK, I'm building an amd64 system, so I'm a little on the bleeding edge
as it is. I'd like to try KDE3.4, right now I have most of kde3.3.2 on my
system, and a few parts of kde3.4 (cause kdm for amd64 has no stable
ebuild and it depends on parts of kde3.4). What's the best way for me
to un-install 3.3.2 and install 3.4? How can I set the ~amd64 keyword for
all kde packages (can this be done on one line?, or one line per portage
section?). What is the safest way to build kde the spit-ebuild, meta packages,
or monolitic?

scharkalvin · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 7:37 pm Post subject:

ranmakun · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:06 pm Post subject:

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

If this is the bug you're talking about, https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86898, its been marked as resolved since late last month.

llsardonicll · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2004 Posts: 110

My 2 cents here:

What I see that some people are overlooking is, just because something is released as 'stable' by the developers, eg KDE 3.4,
doesn't mean it should be in portage as stable, it needs to be tested in a gentoo environment. It also works vice-versa, just take
a look at how many 'unstable' packages are marked x86.

I just know I'm very grateful for all the hard work the gentoo devs put into this in the first place.

Strapahuulia · Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 5:51 pm Post subject:

So KDE 3.4 isn't marked stable because people using an unstable compiler with an experimental feature backported from an alpha-versioned compiler release don't break their systems?
This is a joke, right?. You just can't mark a software as big as KDE stable only by the time it compiles with every possible set of CFLAGS...!
Besides, all that's keeping me from installing KDE from ~x86 is that it requires way too much ebuild names to be put in /etc/portage/package.keywords...

assaf · Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 6:48 pm Post subject: