I had already finished compiling KDE-5_19.10 and was waiting for the Plasma 5.17 public release announcement, when Pat upgraded libdvdread in slackware-current. That could mean trouble because of the dreaded ‘Shared library .so-version bump‘ message.
But he added the older libdvdread.so.4 library to aaa_elflibs so that the k3b program in Plasma5 does not break, and hopefully it remains in there until after I recompile k3b (which ultimately happens for the Plasma5 November release).

Unfortunately the earlier update of the ‘icu4c’ package broke some other stuff in Plasma5 as well. Be sure to install my ‘icu4c-compat‘ package, which contains the libraries from several older icu4c packages. Read my older article on ‘shared library .so version bumps‘ if you have not already done so, to understand the causes for this breakage.

The packages for KDE-5_19.10 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

What’s new in the October 2019 release

This month’s KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.63.0, Plasma 5.17.0 and Applications 19.08.2. All this on top of Qt 5.13.1.

Deps:
The ‘cracklib’ package got a version bump, and the latest ‘phonon’ and ‘phonon-vlc’ releases have been packaged.
The telepathy dependencies have been removed completely. Indeed, the feedback on my question in the README for last month’s ‘ktown’ release made clear that no one uses KDE Telepathy. For me it never worked anyway, so this month we say good-bye to KDE Telepathy and its dependencies.
Note that ‘qt5’ and ‘qt5-webkit’ should really be recompiled to fix the icu4c broken dependency, but I do not have the time right now, and the icu4c-compat package will take care of this anyway. Soon, though.

Frameworks:
Frameworks 5.63.0 is a regular update release. See: https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.63.0.php, but there is something worth mentioning still: the packages ‘kcalcore’ and ‘kcontacts’ which were part of KDE Applications and which you would find in the kde/kdepim section of my ‘ktown’ repository, have moved to the KDE Frameworks. As part of this move, ‘kcalcore’ was also renamed to ‘kcalendarcore’.

Plasma:
Plasma 5.17.0 is the start of a new release cycle of the Desktop part of KDE. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.0.php. Some take-aways from the release notes: the Plasma startup script (/usr/bin/startkde) which was traditionally a bash script has been replaced with a C++ program which is faster than the interpreted shell script code, and also starts the various services in parallel. The devs claim that Plasma5 desktop starts up a lot faster as a result. Do you feel the same?
Chrome/Chromium should blend in more with the Breeze theme and GTK applications should have the KDE color scheme applied. There’s more to read, just follow the above link.

Plasma-extra;
I updated ‘latte-dock’ which is my default application launcher here on the laptop for a couple of months now.
Note that ‘sddm-qt5’ should really be recompiled against the new icu4c in slackware-current, but like with qt5, my ‘icu4c-compat’ package will fix the breakage for now. This one is on my TODO list for next week.

Applications;
Applications 19.08.2 is a stability and bug-fix update for the 19.08 cycle. For more information, see https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-19.08.2.php and you may still want to visit the original release notes for 19.08.0 as well.

Applications-extra:
I upgraded ‘digikam’, ‘libktorrent’, ‘ktorrent’, ‘alkimia’, ‘kmymoney’, ‘kpmcore’, ‘krita’, ‘okteta’, and the development suite ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-php’ and and ‘kdev-python’ to their latest releases.

Telepathy:
KDE Telepathy is no longer part of my ‘ktown’ distribution of KDE Plasma5.

Where to get it

Download the KDE-5_19.10 from the usual location at https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/ . Check out the README file in the root of the repository for detailed installation or upgrade instructions.

Development of Plasma5 is tracked in git: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/ .
A new Plasma5 Live ISO has been uploaded and you will find it at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/)

Have fun! Eric