philosophy of design; request for instruction

[Paul Vixie]

i have in the past created a new VM and started over just to get rid of OS and 
app settings i could no longer find or fix, and then migrated my personal 
files to the new VM, and then killed the old one. sometimes that's windows, 
but i've had to do it to mac/os, and freebsd, and linux. sometimes KDE is 
involved, but it can just as easily be due to immortal files created by a web 
browser or an office suite. as princess leia famously but rhetorically asked, 
"when you blasted your way in here, didn't you have some plan for getting 
out?" that answer was and always will be "no" for software.

if there's a way to get tip-of-branch modern-up-to-the-day KDE and KDE PIM on 
freebsd or devuan, i'd drop suse tumbleweed in a new york minute, due to 
systemd. opacity has to trend downward or we all die from the heat death of 
complexity. systemd reminds me of akonadi in some ways. i'd pay real money to 
avoid ever seeing either again, or failing that, to make their operations 
fully transparent and testable. a lot of us moved off of VAX/VMS due to its 
gradually increasing monolithic opaque complexity. history records that lesson 
but it can't be taught and so must be re-learned by every new generation.

on my rolling suse tumbleweed distribution, which replaces all of itself about 
twice a week, my "about" window has this to say:

Kontact Version 5.14.1 (20.04.0)
KDE Frameworks 5.70.0
Qt 5.15.0 (built against 5.15.0)
The xcb windowing system

how do i get a KDE PIM that new without using an OS that's crossed over to 
systemd? i know my way around "apt" on devuan and "ports" on freebsd. i'd be 
willing to run a cvs/svn/git/whatever "pull" and then run some kind of build 
command twice a week if that's the answer to avoiding systemd. i can also add 
repositories to "apt" if someone is making packages for devuan (which is just 
debian w/o systemd). i promise to write a blog about it to help others, if 
someone who knows the answer will teach me.

-- 
Paul