CI Requirements - Lessons Not Learnt?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On 2017 M01 6, Fri 17:20:08 CET Kevin Kofler wrote:
> PS:
> 
> I wrote:
> > Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> >> For packagers it should not matter at all. This is the most common
> >> situation for distribution. And in the release of e.g. Plasma they have
> >> to handle this for hundreds of updated dependencies.
> >> 
> >> It's also not unexpected, because we have a dependency freeze in place
> >> prior to the release, thus the dependencies are announced way ahead.
> >> 
> >> It's only a "problem" for distros if they want to backport to an older
> >> release as in the case of Fedora. Honestly I consider this unreasonably.
> >> If you don't have a problem with backporting hundreds of packages I don't
> >> think that the one additional package is a problem.
> > 
> > The problem is that core packages such as xkbcommon are maintained by
> > different people than the Qt/KDE stack. It is not always possible for the
> > KDE maintainers to get such non-KDE dependencies updated in stable
> > releases (or in the worst case, even in Rawhide).
> 
> An even more extreme example is Rex Dieter's efforts to provide current KDE
> packages for RHEL. There is little to no chance to getting a package such as
> xkbcommon updated in RHEL itself. So the repository ends up having to
> update not only software from KDE, but also several other packages.
> Obviously, the idea is to keep those at a minimum, not to replace half of
> the distro! It kinda defeats the point of rebuilding the KDE packages for
> RHEL if at the end you are essentially running the latest Fedora with .el7
> disttags.

At work we were just a few months ago updated to a "recent" installation. It's 
now a RHEL 7 with KDE 4.14. Before it was a SLES with a KDE 4.4 or something 
ancient like that.
So now, with the recent "update", I'm already again using basically obsolete 
software, since I guess e.g. kwin in 4.14 won't be fixed anymore (after 
switching to another virtual desktops kwin is busy for a few seconds before it 
reacts again).
It will probably take a few more years until we get a system with Plasma 5. 
:-/
 
> KDE software used to be much less demanding of the base system than the
> competition, it used to be easy to provide the software even for fairly old
> base systems such as RHEL n or even RHEL n-1. This has become much worse
> lately, with dependencies on bleeding-edge versions of: xkbcommon, Wayland
> libraries, etc. (And KWin is one of the worst offenders there, though
> definitely not the only one.)

there would be the pragmatic solution to (I know distros don't like that etc. 
etc.) to include a copy of the required xkbcommon library and link it 
statically if no matching version is found on the system. There could be an 
extra cmake switch to enable it...

Alex