[kde-linux] KDE 3.2.1 after konstruct

[James Richard Tyrer]

Marc Heyvaert wrote:
> Hello James,
> 
> --- James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> wrote:
> 
>>Konstruct encourages people that have NEVER
>>installed anything from source 
>>to install KDE from source.  Therefore, instructions
>>that are more than 
>>sufficient for people that know what they are doing
>>are not sufficient for 
>>newbies that have no idea what they are doing. 
>>These terse instructions 
>>are simply not adequate for a newbie:
>>
> 
> 
> I agree that a tutorial should be a +, on the other
> hand installing from .rpm's is probably already beyond
> the capabilities of most newbies and casual users.
> 
> If you want to give instructions installing from
> source, one has to make so many assumptions about the
> state of the installers machine. From my experience,
> most distributions don't setup the OS so that
> installing KDE/KOffice from source is possible
> right-away. A *lot* of -devel packages are generally
> *not* installed. There is a script in the Konstrukt
> package that checks SuSE distro's IIRC, I remember
> using the script and I was amazed of how much was
> still lacking on my PC.
> 
> Error messages after ./configure can also be helpful,
> but for a newbie? I think not.
> 
> No, I think that there are limits to what you can
> explain to people. Perhaps the KDE community should
> concentrate on providing packages for the different
> distro's and explain these really well. The last time
> I upgraded my KDE, I did this with the .rpm's SuSE
> provides. Even this is too complicated IMO for a
> newbie. Even wen you follow the instructions (very
> terse!
> http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/linuks/index.html
> and
> http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/linuks/i386/update_for_8_2/base.html
> ) you get tons of dependency problems. I had the
> courage to ignore them all and clean up the system
> afterwards, and as of today I live with some of the
> consequences : I would label my system only 95% stable
> and OK.
> 
> My point is that a newbie and a casual user will never
> continue the installation beyond opening the first
> package few packages and reading the
> dependency-problem messages that YAST fires at him.

OK, you certainly have some good points.

I do note that in general fixing dependency problems with RPM is possible. 
  It can take hours to install them all, but it is possible.  The only 
exception to this was upgrading from RedHat 6.x to RedHat 7.0.  That was 
something that was not simple.  It was such a mess that I switched to 
L(mostly)FS based on some RedHat-9 RPMs (I am converting over to Fedora).

I guess that I am talking about a limited population of newbies (newbies to 
installing KDE from source at least) that have succeeded in building KDE 
with Konstruct and don't know enough about their system to get it running 
after they install it.  This population does need a tutorial on how to 
properly setup their system -- the README file is not sufficient for them 
especially if they choose to do a global install.

Actually, this is not limited to those that used Konstruct.  Some people 
manage to build from source by hand but still have problems getting it 
running -- system configuration problems with the environment variables or 
with configuring KDM.

--
JRT