[kde-linux] ME/CFS

[James Tyrer]

On 09/07/2015 09:13 PM, Duncan wrote:
> James Tyrer posted on Mon, 07 Sep 2015 13:47:42 -0700 as excerpted:
>
>> I am taking medication for both ME/CFS and the stroke and have been
>> doing some better.  However, I do still have this tendency to channel
>> Steve Jobs which I presume that some of the KDE developers would have
>> serious problems with.
>
> Channeling Steve Jobs, indeed, for better or worse, it does seem that way
> sometimes.
>
His perfectionism did make Apple the company that it is today.  I didn't 
decide to be that way.  I think that it is genetic and I inherited if 
from my German Grandfather.

Some perfection is what KDE clearly needs rather than the apparent 
hacker credo that if it just works that is good enough.  The problem is 
that stuff that "just works" doesn't actually work because it is based 
on poorly designed code.

>> So, since I am feeling better, I might risk posting bug reports again
>> and hope that developers don't say something to the effect that I am not
>> allowed to post bug reports, reopen MY bugs, or post patches to fix
>> bugs.
>
> However others may react, a welcome back from me. =:^)
>
> What kde/plasma/apps are you testing now, still kde4, or on to
> frameworks5/plasma5/mixed4&5-apps?  Wish to compare notes?
>
>
> FWIW, I'm trying kde-frameworks-5/plasma5 again today, after trying it a
> handful of times some months ago and having kwin5 throw a respawn cycle.
> But back then, gentoo didn't have even qt5 let alone frameworks/plasma/
> apps in the main tree, only in the qt and kde development overlays, while
> now it's in the main tree and marked for general testing, with some parts
> fully stabilized, so we'll see.
>
I am somewhat behind on keeping KDE up to date.  Breaking it up into a 
lot of pieces is a questionable idea if you have to build all of the 
pieces.  It is only where the apps are optional that it is a good thing 
(e.g. only building the games that you want).

> The big problem for me was that since parts of the respawn-cycling plasma5
> blocked parts of the otherwise working kde4, it was extremely difficult
> to test, requiring basically a whole otherwise free day dedicated to
> doing so, and I hadn't had any of those I wanted to spend that way, in
> awhile.  But today I finally had/took some time and nailed down exactly
> how many and which of the base plasma5-desktop deps I could build and
> install WITHOUT hitting the blockers, and it turned out that (with my
> already fairly minimal kde4-plasma-and-base-system install) I got it all
> the way down to four plasma5 packages remaining blocked on eleven kde4
> packages, of which I had to manually uninstall five, with the other six
> deps of those.
>
Reading through the Linux from Scratch build book (BLFS) it appears that 
to have a separate 4.x.y based installation with specific 15.4.03 
upgrades and a KDE Frameworks 5 installation.  I was in the process of 
checking the 4.14.3 installation to make sure that it was up to date and 
built with Qt-4.8.7.  Then I will upgrade the recommended packages to 
15.4.03.

> So now that I'm down to only 4 plasma5 packages blocked on 5+6=11 kde4
> packages, I've gone ahead and done the uninstall of the 5+6, and built
> and installed the remaining 4 plasma5 apps.  I actually switched to the
> lists to see what was going on while they installed, and found your post,
> but I checked and the last four plasma5 packages are successfully
> installed, now.
>
> Before I started all this today, I did a backup of my system and home
> partitions, so I don't have to worry about those getting screwed up in
> the experiment.
>
> So all that's left is to figure out what bits of my own customized CLI-
> login kde4-starter script need adjusted, what to start to try plasma5
> again (for all I know some then missing bit was what was triggering the
> kwin5 respawning back then), and the actual kde4 shutdown (it has been
> well over a decade since I left MS, but it still amazes me that I can
> uninstall those blocker packages and still be running on top of them
> until I actually shut kde4 down), shuffle the old kde4 user-level
> settings out of the way, and try plasma5 once again.  Hopefully whatever
> was triggering that respawn loop is now fixed and I can actually get up
> and going on the still-minimal plasma5 installation.
>
> If so, I've still a lot more building out to do on the kf5-based apps
> side.
>
> If not, at least this time it's only a quick uninstall of the minimal-
> blocking-set four plasma5 packages and a reinstall (from binpkg, no
> rebuild) of the eleven kde4 packages, with everything else non-
> conflicting and staying installed, where it will continue to update as
> new versions come out.  And switching out that minimal-blocking-set
> should be easy enough, so testing cycles should be far faster now, and
> hopefully any remaining blocker bugs like that kwin5 respawn thing will
> be easily resolved.
>
> I'll post back when I see whether I can actually run plasma5, now, and
> then, presuming you're either switched or attempting to switch as well,
> we can compare notes on the kde-frameworks/plasma5 side.
>
It appears to me that the best way to have Plasma5 is to do a full 
install of KDE Framework 5 in a different directory (i.e. /opt/kf5 if 
you have KDE4 in /opt/kde4) and use a separate user account to access it 
that will properly set things up.  The BLFS book shows this as a 
profile.d script but that would only be if you were switching to 
Plasma5.  If you were only doing it with a single user file, you would 
want it in that user's .bash_profile file.

This may also require a default setup file added to your profile.d 
directory to set other accounts up to use KDE4.  I am not sure about that.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch