Upgrade to Plasma - but not really... what the...

[Loci79]

Today I tried to upgrade my rather stable Gentoo installation to Plasma/KDE5.
The news read as if everything was ready to emerge to a stable state of art.

What I got was:
- a lot of conflicts I had to solve witch emerge -C
- a lot of headache which I had to solve by emerging single packages
- another lot of headache when I saw the list of kept libraries which need a rebuild
- and a terrible headache when I noticed not even the most basic programs have been marked stable.

Dear maintainers... if you send out a message we should upgrade and set a grace period you will keep another version you should at least keep track of what you set stable.
At my current state I have compiled (and not running!!!) most of Plasma. What I am missing is a slot :5 version of everything which is KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator.... did you have a look at them? I can't even find them.
Aaaaaaand because I can't find versions of these stable version and I'm not willing to let go my kmail (took me ages to configure it) there is a bear called baloo telling me he cannot update...

Well, and at the end of this well told story I would the maintainers let to know that I have only my weekends to work with my Gentoo. And I have no patience sorting out the shit they built this time!

Keep your track.

Loci

[davidm]

Hello, are you on x86 or amd64? If the former (x86) I believe it was said that the message probably should not have gone out to you because it really isn't stable for x86 yet.

If amd64 they set it up to try to make it so you could basically switch profiles (to plasma) and have it work. There is also the gentoo plasma upgrade guide which hopefully you saw and followed:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE/Plasma_5_upgrade

Make sure you followed the cleanup step and removed the --pretend after running it to once check it. Also it doesn't hurt to check your world file to see if you have any of those packages within it for whatever reason as that might cause issues.

Also generally you can still use qt4 programs under Plasma 5. It's just that sometimes it can be a mess with how they interact with each other in building and at runtime. That's part of being source based (Gentoo) and part the nature of how KDE set things up to allow a transition period.

You should post your baloo update error and other blockers and someone might be able to help you.

As for KDEPIM with Korganizer, Kmail, and Akregator the qt4 versions should work. I don't think the qt5 versions are stable yet though I could be wrong. However I know you can find them in the Gentoo kde-overlay if you want to go that route:

[Loci79]

Hi,

I'm on amd64 and I followed the Plasma upgrade guide from the Wiki.

The problem is baloo. Plasma pulls a newer version than kdepim-common-libs. But I cannot update the kdepim-common-libs as there is no later version - there is no single package in the :5 slot for KDEPIM. But I can't downgrade baloo because it's needed by Plasma.
Unmerging baloo and kdepim-common-libs in order to let emerge solve that by itself doesn't help, too.

[asturm]

You don't look at the relevant part of the output here, scroll to line where it says [ebuild B] for baloo and notice it only blocks a certain USE flag setting on baloo:4.

Apparently you didn't follow the guide's recommendation on either choosing plasma profile or USE minimal setup, because then it would be a non-issue.

[Goverp]

FWIW, I followed the upgrade guide very carefully on my AMD64 desktop box with KDE4, KDEPIM and a load of other stuff. No problems with blockers at all. Everything went just as it should.

That said, it doesn't actually work properly at the moment.
SDDM lets me login OK, but instead of a shiny new desktop, I get a back screen (or more accurately, whatever is left in the display gubbins' memory) when it gets to startkde. I'm still diagnosing that. Currently I have to startx, and then run startkde from an xterm window, which leaves me with a nasty basic window manager, but at least I can run all my applications from the resulting desktop.

It's a shame none of this software layer can demean itself to write error messages to syslog.
_________________
Greybeard

[asturm]

* check sddm user is in the video group
* check that /etc/sddm.conf exists
* check that xinerama is not configured in xorg.conf

[Loci79]

The "minimal" flag was the issue. Thanks for pointing that out. I read the guide but somehow I didn't see that. Maybe it should be added to one of the grep commands below.

I also had the problem with sddm not being in the video group. As the user gets created by the package it should also be added to the video group automatically.

[asturm]

Well, a guide should not just be about pasting code blocks one after another. The parts that require more complicated commands are well covered, and some of them can of course be re-used with other USE flags mentioned in the text. But since people apparently like to set or unset minimal in make.conf, I've even put it in bold some time ago.

[leifbk]

I'm also running stable amd64, and was led to believe that Plasma 5 was mature and stable by the portage news article. I have upgraded the whole shebang to KF5, including the kde-apps/kde-apps-meta which appended a mile to my package.keywords file. I can assure OP that KMail still works - about as badly as it did in KDE4. How i miss KMail 1.x

On the bright side, Kontact now includes a calendar that seems to work out of the box.

I 've got one annoying problem: Whenever I hover on the taskbar with the mouse and get a preview of a window, I get a segfault.

[asturm]