[kde-linux] Not installing KDE-4.5

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:43:05 -0700 as excerpted:

> How do the Gentoo people
> find this stuff out.  Do the developers refuse to help them as well, or
> do they cooperate?

>From what I gather based on following the comments on the overlay git 
commits (the gentoo/kde overlay is handled with git, but the main tree is 
still on cvs, so once it moves there, it's conventional change logs), it's 
a combination.

Some of it is simply domain knowledge -- they work with it all the time 
and know how to read the actual cmake files and code.

Some of it is following the various kde-dev discussions, including both IRC 
and the lists, and being able to pop on IRC and ask a question if there's 
a doubt.

Some of it is similarly following the rolling live updates, both of trunk, 
and of the branches.  There's generally ebuilds for each prerelease, for 
trunk/head, and for each current branch/head.  The gentoo/kde community is 
big enough, both user and devs, that if live trunk/head or a branch/head 
suddenly changes deps, if the devs and official app-testers don't find it, 
users themselves generally will within half a week or less, they'll hop on 
IRC and tell the gentoo/kde team, one of the app-testers will verify 
(again, hopping on upstream IRC and asking if a change was intended, if 
needed), and the dependency changes will be made to the gentoo/kde overlay 
within a week, and often within a day of the upstream change.

And some of it is following official policy changes, generally made and 
often announced at or shortly after the various kde sub-project coding 
sprints, akademy, etc.  The implementing code may take some time to 
actually appear, but there was a heads-up some time previously due to 
comments on someone's kde-planet blog or the like, after whatever meeting.

I'm not part of the gentoo/kde project, just a user, myself.  And as until 
4.4 anyway, kde4 was already so broken/pre-release quality, I didn't even 
try to run the official kde pre-releases, because what I was running was 
already sub-release quality as it was.  So I've not been directly 
connected with all this testing and etc.  But as mentioned, I do follow 
the git-whatchanged logs, faithfully reviewing them at every update (once 
or twice a week now, generally), and see the gentoo/kde comments about 
changes on the live builds within days of them being made.  I'm not 
exactly sure how many people they have working on it, but I'd say five at 
least, semi-active with overlay commit rights, and very possibly over a 
dozen including those active on the gentoo/kde irc channels reporting 
changes but not necessarily with commit rights.  With that many people 
active on just the distribution updates, each one following one or more of 
the multiple branches for his own reasons and updating upto daily (some 
even more often if they catch an upstream update in the middle and need to 
sync again to get something or other buildable again), it doesn't /take/ 
super-human skills or official cooperation that may or may not be there 
all the time, to keep at least the leading edge dependencies on the actual 
released versions to something approaching sane.  

FWIW, there is I believe more difficulty at the trailing edge, verifying 
building and functionality with a gentoo/arch-stable installation, before 
actually keywording stable, but let's face it, neither you nor I are 
particularly interested in what seems comparatively stale, to us, either.  
They don't usually stable the 4.x.0 at all, sometimes not stabling until 
4.x.2 or 4.x.3, and they often only stable every second or third one after 
that, so 2-3 of the six in the six-month series, with 4.4.5 current 
stable.  It does look like they finally un-keyworded kde on some of the 
slower archs, mips, etc, and are only ~arch keywording some archs, 
allowing them to drop earlier versions, with 4.4.5 now the trailing edge 
kde version in the tree.  But 4.3.5 and 4.4.4 were in the tree until 
August 9, according to the gentoo main tree kdelibs changelog, and neither 
you nor I have had any interest whatsoever in 4.3, for months, now.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman