Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 7, 2011 06:19:52 Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> The Moratorium would extend to all components of the KDE SC
>> distribution. Hence kde-core-devel.
>
> imho this is impossible, for the reasons Martin noted.
>
>> The components affected by the Moratorium - namely the Kernel, X and
>> ALSA interfaces are not easy to build. For those of us on non-rolling
>
> can you provide an answer to Kevin's initial question, namely: what are the
> actual cases that triggered this concern? e.g. what currently relies on a
> recent kernel, X or alsa?

I have two examples, Phonon and KWin.

First Phonon. The Xine backend has now been deprecated, and has
already broken in applications such as Amarok. The VLC backend gives
me terrible skipping. Apparently upgrading to a newer version of VLC
is needed to use it - but that depends on XCB 1.6. I only have 1.5.
Phonon GStreamer - whilst installable, crashes applications on startup
- and is therefore unusable. This effectively removes the capability
to have multimedia playback using a KDE application.

I tried (unsuccessfully unfortunately) to backport some of the fixes
which would fix the skipping in Phonon VLC - but that didn't work.

Next KWin. It currently depends upon Mesa 7.10. I have a local revert
in a private local branch which reverts the dependency check code
within KWin to continue to allow me to use compositing. Even though I
have Mesa 7.8, I rarely experience KWin crashes - it has only crashed
once in the past 2 months. I use an Intel Ironlake based graphics.
This patch of mine works perfectly and does not cause any issues.

Both of these are requiring new versions of X.

>
> for the same sort of reasons we can not make a all-SC decision, it's very hard
> to have a productive discusson without examples to demonstrate the problem
> which can then be analyzed and understood.
>
> since you mentioned custom patches, disable features and compilation failures,
> you must have at least a couple of them :)

Whilst the compilation failures don't exist at the moment, I have one
working patch - and several that have failed (and don't compile)

>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
> humru othro a kohnu se
> GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
>
> KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
>

Regards,
Ben