Re: [gentoo-user] meta-packages and buildpkgonly

[Paul Hartman]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Roy Wright <roy@××××××.org> wrote:
> Neil Bothwick wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:14:34 +0100 (CET), Helmut Jarausch wrote:
>>
>>> nice -19 emerge -j4 --buildpgkonly kde-base/kde-meta
>>>
>>> but it takes next to no time instead of hours and
>>> hasn't build the binary packages without any error messages.
>>> What am I missing?
>>
>> --buildpkg only works if the dependent packages are installed, you cannot
>> build kmail-4.2 (for package or install) if kdelibs-4.2 is not installed.
>> That's a long way round of saying that you can't do what you want and
>> build all the KDE4 packages in advance.
>>
>> To minimise downtime, even though it increases the overall install time,
>> you could upgrade you your KDE3 install to 3.5.10. Then you can install
>> KDE 4.x alongside it.
>
> KDE 4.2 is slotted so I just built it as normal from within kde 4.1.4 while
> continuing to use the system.  When the emerge finished, I continued in
> 4.1.4 for about an hour until I hit a stopping point, then dispatched-conf
> (no kde conf changes) logged out and chose 4.2 and logged back in (didn't
> even restart X).  This was smoothest kde upgrade that I can recall, big
> kudos to the devs!
>
> A few hours into using 4.2 and no glitches!  I'm actually able to use
> plasmoids without 10 second UI freezes.  Whoop!  And that's on nvidia
> 8600GTS and ~x86.  First impression is 4.2 is ready for prime time.
>
> Have fun,
> Roy

Random KDE 4.2 impressions from a long-time KDE 3.x user:

I still get desktop crashes when trying to do things with plasmoids
(randomly) so I don't have any, and I question their usefulness
anyway. adding "desktop widgets" while simultaneously removing
traditional icons and trying to discourage people from "using the
desktop" (in vista as well as KDE) seems odd to me. I miss my dockable
weather applet from KDE 3.5 :( I don't want to have to minimize
everything I've got open just to see the temperature on a widget. But
that's not a problem because the weather widget in KDE4 doesn't work
for me anyway.

All konsole sessions run from the same procress, so when it crashed
while browsing fonts, it crashed every konsole i had open all at
once...

Default fonts (by family, serif, sans-serif, etc) in KDE4 were
corrupted for me in every version (maybe I'm missing some fonts that
the ebuild doesn't require?), I had to manually change every font to a
specific existing font to make them not look horrible (anti-aliasing)
and to fix the invisible text problem (blank text on add widget
dialog, blank text on taskbar).

I got X crashes constantly until I removed all nvidia settings from my
xorg.conf and just used the defaults. It has been good since then.

Performance/responsiveness (with desktop effects enabled) is nowhere
near as good as 3.5, obviously. Specifically konsole is SO SLOW. Using
the right (or wrong) combination of fonts and font settings can cause
simply running top in a konsole to use 99% CPU. Scrolling around in MC
with the arrow keys is sluggish. Disabling the KDE desktop effects
makes this problem go away, but then that's the only big improvement
over KDE 3.

KDE4 tries to automount discs and USB drives etc which I hate. I
haven't tried to disable it yet but it's on my list of things to do.

I do not use the GUI file manager stuff (in KDE3 or KDE4) so I can't
say whether that's any better or worse. KDE4 uses one-click to launch
stuff by default which is really annoying to me. I'm sure that can be
changed somewhere but again I haven't had time to mess with that yet.

Visually it looks like a total rip-off of Vista, including the new 4.2
taskbar. The default window borders theme is grey and I find it has
too little contrast, it's hard to tell which things are active/focused
and which are background. I've accidentally clicked the wrong X a few
times. :P

In KDE 4.0 and 4.1 I tried them for less than 1 day and gave up, going
back to 3.x. This time I'm trying to force myself to stick with KDE
4.2 for a while to see how it goes. Especially since it seems KDE3 is
going to reach unsupported state in the near future...

The lack of an upgrade from KDE3 to KDE4 is really annoying. I had
hundreds of sites in Akregator. Fired up KDE4 and it was blank. eek!
Tried copying over the data files, Akregator crashed every time.
Eventually I was able to copy just the definitions but not the message
data and that seems to have worked without crashing so far... but i
lost all my archived data. :(