During these final days of my relatively long Christmas holiday, I have started looking at the KDE 5 build scripts again. KDE 4 has seen its final release sometime ago, and Patrick shows no signs of updating the KDE in slackware-current, so in order to bring some fresh excitement to KDE users on Slackware, I am pondering an update of the “testing” repository aka the KDE5 repository.
In December, the KDE community released the first tarballs of the “Applications” which is the first step to completion of the new KDE 5 desktop. Remember: the Frameworks 5 came first (a set of modular libraries that expand the functionality of Qt5), Plasma 5 builds a desktop workspace on top of the Frameworks, so that had to come next, and finally there are the Applications which are now ported from the KDE 4 Development Platform to Frameworks 5 slowly.
In particular that recent release of Applications 14.12 (the notation used here is YY.mm) gave me some headaches. Most of these applications are familiar from KDE 4, and only a few are now ready for the Plasma 5 desktop workspace (Kate and KWrite, Konsole, Gwenview, KAlgebra, Kanagram, KHangman, Kig, Parley, KApptemplate and Okteta). It is impossible for me to separate the KDE 5 applications from the KDE 4 applications. Their names have not changed, and whereas I needed to rename a few packages in Frameworks and Plasma in order to prevent a clash with package names in the KDE 4 set, I do not want to do the same for the Applications. After all, when running Plasma 5 you do not want to see both KDE 4 and Plasma 5 versions of the Konsole application in your desktop menu – just the Plasma 5 version. Also, compiling these “Applications 14.12” will cause a lot of KDE 4 packages to be overwritten – for example, marble-4.14.3 with marble-14.12.0 et cetera. That is a one-way road. I can not think of a clean method of separating the old and the new.
In my “preview” of KDE 5, I was able to offer the KDE 5 packages as co-installable to KDE 4 because it was not yet more than Frameworks and Plasma packages – it needed the presence of KDE 4.x in order to provide a meaningfull Plasma 5 workspace. That meant, you could install KDE 5, play around with it for a bit, and then un-install the packages if you had seen enough, without this process touching or destroying the configuration of your KDE 4 environment. That was a good thing, because Plasma 5 was quite unstable at that time, and the whole exercise was not meant to probide an actual day-to-day work environment.
We are now 5 months further in time, and the current state of Frameworks/Plasma 5 combined with the new set of Application releases, should provide a stable platform that is slowly migrating from KDE 4 to 5.
That is why I decided to not stretch my luck and try another co-installable version of KDE 5 but instead go all the way and provide a full upgrade from KDE 4.14.3 to Frameworks/Plasma/Applications. It will take a while because of all the unknowns, but I think I have done most of the preparations now (gathering all the sources, updating the build scripts). It will be a matter of compiling, fixing failures and retracing issues to their resolution.
I think I will also provide scripts for an easy roll-back from the new KDE 5 packages to either the default Slackware packages or else my KDE 4.14.3 packages.
Note that this is going to be relevant and beneficial only to people who are running Slackware-current (our development version) so if you are going to want to try this later on, you need to know what you are up to. Once you will upgrade from KDE 4 to my new KDE 5 packages, it may not be trivial (i.e. without cleaning out your ~/.kde and ~/.local directories) to downgrade at a later point in time.
End transmission.
Eric
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