[gentoo-user] KDE plasma upgrade heads up for possible problem

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Howdy,

I just did a KDE plasma upgrade to 5.15.  I ran into a slight problem
that may or may not affect others so I wanted to give a heads up just in
case.  Everything builds fine.  I had no compile or install failures. 
What I did run into tho was a missing or more likely crashed
kicker/panel/thingy that is at the bottom of my screen.  It's the thing
that has the clock, desktop switcher, clip board and the K menu as
well.  I never can remember what they call that this week.  Anyway, when
I logged in, it came up for just a second or two and then disappeared. 
Obviously, you can't switch desktops in the normal way but if you use
the ctrl and functions keys, it doesn't act or look like it normally
should since there doesn't appear to be any background at all.  Example,
I have Kpatience on desktop 6.  If I switch to it with the ctrl function
keys, I can play the game normally.  However, if I switch to what at
startup is a empty desktop, #5 for example, the game still shows but
doesn't work.  If I switch back to desktop 6, it works as it should
again.  Whatever it is, it doesn't redraw the screen when you switch if
you don't have something already running there.  Other programs behaved
in a similar way.  It makes it look like all desktops are on one desktop
yet switching still works.  It's plenty weird.  Also, there is no K menu
so you can't start any programs that doesn't open from a saved session
on login.  Trust me, if you run into this, you won't miss it.  Even if
you don't notice the panel thingy at the bottom missing, you will notice
the rest.  It gets in your face and yells loudly that something ain't
right.  lol

What little bit of error I found mentioned something about a missing
input.  To be honest tho, I'm not sure it was related to what I saw
happening.  None of the errors looked like a complete failure but more
as a informational type message.  Sort of like video drivers that have
the "--" or "II".  They show something didn't work as expected but it
found a way around it or works without it. 

I don't have enough info to file a bug.  The way I fixed it, I did a
emerge -e world.  It might be that a emerge -ek would fix it but to be
sure, I let it recompile everything.  It didn't quite finish when I
tried to login and it worked normally.  If I had a clue what package it
was that was causing this, I'd certainly file a bug but it could be any
number of packages.  I suspect it is a dependency myself.  Something
needed to be rebuilt but wasn't for some reason.

I hope no one runs into this but if you do, make sure you at least have
a back up GUI installed, even if it doesn't give you anything but the
basics, at least you have a GUI.  You may also want to make sure you
have time to deal with this just in case you do run into this problem. 
Having something so you can go back to 5.14 easily may work as well. 

Best of luck to all.  I hope no one else hits this.  It was plenty weird. 

Dale

:-)  :-)