Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] News Item: KDE Plasma 6.1.4 and Gear 24.05.2 Upgrade

[Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>]

Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org> writes:

> Title: KDE Plasma 6.1.4 and Gear 24.05.2 Upgrade
> Author: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org>
> Posted: 2024-08-31
> Revision: 1
> News-Item-Format: 2.0
> Display-If-Installed: kde-plasma/plasma-workspace:5
>
> Reasons
> =======
>
> KDE Plasma 5 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by Gentoo.
> Qt5 upstream OSS support ended on 2020-12-08, and LTS releases - even with
> considerable effort by KDE community's backports on top - only go so far.
> It is therefore required for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 6[1].
>
> At the same time, KDE Gear 24.05.2 is provided with most applications ported
> over to KDE Frameworks 6. As long as KF5-based applications are being shipped
> with the KDE Gear bundle, and other non-KDE Qt5-based applications still
> common in ::gentoo repository, it is advised *not* to disable USE="qt5".
>
>
> Changes
> =======
>
> Not many - much like Qt6, this is mostly an evolution of the existing
> codebase, no disruptive feat.
>
> Plasma Wayland support has come a long way and therefore KDE developers have
> decided to make it the default login session for Plasma 6, even if some
> known papercuts[2] remain. For users affected too much by those, switching
> to the still existing X11 session is as easy as selecting it in the display
> manager of choice. Disabling USE="wayland" is *not* changing this default,
> it will yield no dependency savings, and we advise against doing so. It does
> not affect users' X11 sessions.
>
> In Gentoo:

Let's rephrase this a bit.

> - arm 32-bit support is discontinued

"The 32-bit ~arm/arm keyword was inconsistent across KDE Plasma, KDE
Frameworks, and KDE Gear, and has been dropped."

> - x86 will not see stabilisation of Plasma 6 and KF6-based packages

"Like for arm, but to a lesser extent, the situation for x86 was
inconsistent and test failures often blocked stabliization."

This makes it sound less final and avoids the potential for
misunderstandings.

>
>
> User Action Required
> ====================
>
> For users of a plasma profile[3], no specific upgrade steps are necessary,
> although some precautionary measures are advised before and during upgrade:
>
> - Switch to a standard (Breeze or Oxygen) theme
> - Unmerge kde-misc/latte-dock, it is unfit for Plasma 6 (and masked already)

s/Unmerge/Depclean/, but weren't there others we should do as well? Or
maybe they're all handled?

Maybe we can recommend: emerge -pev @world --backtrack=0 and emerge
--deselecting any KDE-adjacent software which says "no ebuilds
available".

> - Cleanup sets and @world from any SLOT or version pinning of KDE packages
> - If possible, perform the upgrade not inside a running Plasma session
>
> Necessary USE flag changes were already made in plasma profile, therefore
> only users of other profiles should set USE="kf6compat qt6" globally[4].
>
> Once the packages become available on your arch, it should be as simple as
> update @world:
>
>     emerge -aquvUD @world
>

-q and -v? (yes, this does work in Portage, but it looks odd...)

>
> [1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
> [2] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
> [3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE#Profile
> [4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.use