Re: [gentoo-user] KDE-4.1.3 + KDE-3.5.9 = messed up KDEDIRS ?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 12 November 2008 22:31:52 Dmitry S. Makovey wrote:
> On November 12, 2008, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> > > I had something similar on my first try:
> > >
> > > kde-4 went into /usr
> > > kde-3 went into /usr/kde/3.5
> > >
> > > And bizarre weird errors kept happening. I remerged all of kde-4 with
> > > USE="kdeprefix" to put it back into /usr/kde/4.1 and all the weirdness
> > > went away
> >
> > in my opinion installing kde straight into /usr and changing the default
> > behaviour is the most stupid thing gentoo devs have done in the last
> > couple of years.
>
> wouldn't call it stupid though. FHS compliance is a good thing (I'm a
> sysadmin so I really appreciate when things can be easily located
> universaly). I think what failed is communication on that change. In
> developers defense I'd say that we're dealing with ~arch packages here so
> we've been warned they'll be somewhat not-so-stable. What I think needs to
> happen is gentoo users have to be warned in big red letters everywhere
> possible when upgrading from KDE3 to KDE4 to make firm decision whether to
> use "kdeprefix" or not.
>
> Enforcing proper FS layout is a good thing IMO. Just needs clear
> communication before marked as stable :)

Essentially what we have with this (the five miles out view) is that portage 
considers there is a SLOT and the rest of the system does not. So as far as 
every other utility on the box is concerned (including KDE-3), the kde-3 SLOT 
simply does not exist, regardless of how nicely portage take care to put 
stuff in it's own little SLOT. You cannot possibly take /usr out of the 
various *PATH dirs, and whereas a funky env script might make kde-3 work, it 
certainly will not work in any other environment.

You either have every version of a SLOT package in a SLOT or you do not. So, I 
like the idea of a non-SLOTted kde-4, but the devs really need to make the 
rules clear. It all boils down to these two:

If you have kde-3 on the same system, you SHALL set USE="kdeprefix"
If you do not have kde-3 on the system you SHALL NOT set USE="kdeprefix"

To hell with choice in this regard. These are the rules that make stuff work. 
There is no choice.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com