Another case of WONTFIX

[Duncan]

gene heskett posted on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:06:45 -0400 as excerpted:

[snip, snip...]

Might as well post this here as anywhere.  I've now upgraded to 4.6.2, and 
have a minor but seriously irritating regression with it (as compared to 
4.6.1 and back to the 4.5s) in regard to plasma, myself.

I run dual monitors, stacked, and with 4.6.2, the large (the plasma-max 
1/3 vertical size of that monitor, full-width horizontal) panel that I 
have CONFIGURED to be at the top of the top panel... *REFUSES* to STAY 
there!

At every plasma-desktop restart (whether a reboot, a kde restart, or only 
a plasma-desktop restart), the panel appears on my LOWER monitor, not the 
upper one it's configured to.  That has worked just fine for many kde 
versions, at least from 4.4 thru my immediately previous 4.6.1.  But with 
4.6.2, it INSISTS on displaying on the lower monitor instead of the upper 
one where it always was and where it remains configured to be.

I can of course unlock widgets, click the panel's toolbox to trigger the 
settings popup, and drag, using the screen-edge button, to the correct 
location.  It then stays there for that plasma-desktop session.  But on 
the next one, it's back on the lower monitor again, and having to repeat 
that unlock/click/click-drag EVERY time gets old VERY fast!

It seems that until 4.5.5 every kde version was an improvement from the 
previous, often a very noticeable improvement.  But apart from 4.6 finally 
ridding kde of the hal dependency (good riddance!), the 4.6 series has 
reversed the trend, first with no real noticeable improvements, now with 
serious regressions!

I'm considering going back to 4.6.0, as rid of the hal dependency of 4.5 
and previous but without the regressions of 4.6.1 (which I luckily didn't 
see) and 4.6.2.

Meanwhile, there's definitely some sort of plasma bug here in 4.6.2.  The 
affect on me is only the above, but it may be that you're seeing a far 
worse version of it.  If in your case that's combining with the cascading 
failure bug I saw in early 4.5 but that was a one-shot failure for me, 
that may well explain why you're having the extreme issues you are.  And 
I've seen mention from others of similar...

So I'd suggest either 4.5.5, for those upgrading from earlier versions and 
don't care about the hal dependency, or 4.6.0, as the most stable 4.6 
release to date, for those who *REALLY* want to be rid of hal as much as I 
did.

Hopefully they fix this trend before it solidifies.  Right now it's a 
couple of exceptions unfortunately in a row, but if 4.6.3 continues it, 
it'll be a definite trend.

Meanwhile, a possible explanation, as I've posted previously, is that kde 
is in the midst of their svn -> git switch, which caused a lot of 
confusion and some bad tarball component pulls for 4.6.1. [1] They were 
trying to avoid that with 4.6.2, but evidently they failed, at least based 
on my personal experience, but look at the other posts, it's not just me.
Hopefully they can fix it for 4.6.3 or later updates, but right now it's 
looking like the whole 4.6 series might end up being bad, and 4.7 might 
well be the best chance to break from the rut.  That'd give them the six-
month feature-release period to straighten out the svn -> git migration 
issues and hopefully get back to the every-release-is-an-improvement trend 
they had, at least for me, in the past.

I know one thing, I'll sure be paying more attention to the 4.6.3 
announcement, to see if there's anything worth upgrading for, before I 
spend the time to build it all, only to find it's a regression, as I did 
with 4.6.2!  Of course with luck they'll have fixed this plasma bug by 
then, and won't have anything worse, but I don't expect it to be the 
automatic upgrade earlier 4.x releases always were, for sure!

__

[1] The source of this info is a a post from the gentoo/kde folks to the 
gentoo-dev list, with a link to the discussion on the kde release list, 
pre-4.6.2 release, where they were trying to avoid the 4.6.1 mistakes.  
The reason for the gentoo-dev post was a discussion of trying to deprecate 
and remove hal, which of course requires a 4.6.0+ version of kde be gentoo-
stabilized.  They were hoping 4.6.2 would be stable enough from upstream 
to do that, but now I'm guessing it'll be 4.6.3 at the earliest and it 
might have to wait until 4.7.2 or so, if the entire 4.6 series turns out 
as bad as the first two updates to it have been, with 4.6.0 not as bad as 
the updates to it thru 4.6.2, but not really stable enough for gentoo-
stable, either.

If anyone really wants/cares, I can probably dig out the reference links.

-- 
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

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