With a few days’ delay due to patches which were contributed at the last moment and resulting build failures (…), the KDE team announced the final increment in the 4.8 series: KDE Software Compilation 4.8.4 . I have packages for you and am announcing those for all users of Slackware-current.

The upgrade is trivial if you are already running Slackware-current. It already contains KDE 4.8.2, so the upgrade to 4.8.4 will mostly give you bug fixes and some performance enhancements. There was some talk about adding an unplanned 4.8.5 release because it will take so long until 4.9 stable but it seems that the reasons for wanting this have been addressed in the form of those patches to the 4.8.4 source tarballs which I mentioned above.

Re-compiling the 4.8.4 sources for Slackware 13.37 will not be so trivial, since you have to update quite a lot of other packages in Slackware (and install some new ones). Check out this directory with symbolic links in the slackware-current source tree. It points to all the package sources which you need if you are going to create packages for 13.37: http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/source/kde/kde-deps-build/ . If there is enough demand, I will consider adding a “13.37 deps” directory for KDE 4.8.4 to the reposititory.

Get my KDE 4.8.4 packages for -current here:

The accompanying README file contains detailed installation/upgrade instructions.

Remember: if you rather want to try out a beta of the future 4.9 series, then I have that available too! See http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/results-of-a-few-days-of-packaging-software/ . I am running that Beta on my desktop and I have not found a single bug yet.

Have fun! Eric