Request for older packages in the distribution

[barnacle]

Okay, I know I'm committing political suicide here - but can I make a plea to include one or two non-cutting edge applications?

In particular, there are still video cards around for which X4.2 is either unreliable or non-functional; and older systems (mainly those which cannot expand memory past around 32M - mostly laptops, I guess) are unusable with KDE2 and later due to excessive swapping.

I'd like to request the inclusion of
kde 1.2 (this has QT1.4 as a prerequisite)
xfree 3.3.6
and probably, whatever the previous version of gnome was, to keep things tidy.

I can't find these in the distribution list, and they're apparently not available from the original vendors any more. It would be a shame to lose them, when they can make older hardware so much more usable. (Icewm as a window manager and the kde1.2 applications make a useful system)

Any thoughts?
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Neil Barnes

[klieber]

I certainly see why that's important for some users. My guess is, however, that there will be a limited number of users who want/need these older versions. Most Gentoo folks prefer the bleeding edge to the dull edge.

Not to detract from your suggestion -- I think it's a valid one. However, I doubt you'll see much focus or emphasis placed on it, simply because of the lack of demand. If you're handy at creating ebuilds and could create a couple for the packages that you suggest, I'm sure they'd be a welcome addition to the portage tree.

Also, if you end up not being able to find a Gentoo solution for this, I recommend Debian Potato -- it has all the programs you requested and is a very, very stable product.

--kurt
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[barnacle]

Kurt,

Thanks for the reply. I thought that might be the response - and certainly, if I do enough research to find out how to make an ebuild, I'll post the results. At the moment I have a couple of machines in various states of linuxes and am trying simply to build QT1.45 and KDE from source found at redhat. So far, it crashes on a line that doesn't seem to exist. I need to investigate this more. (maybe something to do with the broken 2.96 compiler on Mandrake)

On the other hand, even though X4.2 is bleeding edge, there are still a lot of chipsets for which it apparently doesn't work, and for which X3.3.6 does. If there is any effort, it should probably go towards the X first.

Regards,
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Neil Barnes

[tukem]

Have you had time to study the situation with xfree3.3.6. I just installed gentoo on P120 48MB with few kernel recompiles and got to the X installation part. I guess that part couldn't any easier.

I thought about about studying how ebuilds work and building one but when you had similar plans I thought to check if you have had any luck.