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Carlo
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Joined: 12 Aug 2002
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 Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 8:07 pm Post subject: |
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| VegetaSSJ5 wrote: | | thanks. you can say when approximately they will be stable? it is already 2 months that they are in testing |
I don't see KDE 3.5.1 going stable, 3.5.2 will be released at end of march, so at least another two months.
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 6:58 pm Post subject: When will KDE 3.5(.x) be stable? |
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| Perhaps the info is widely present on the forums/website somewhere, if so, it seems to have passed by me... My question is, if KDE 3.5(.x) is going to be marked stable any time soon? Why is it still unstable? |
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radfoj
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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Hehe, a quote from that bug:
| Quote: | Akregator has an unresolved (upstream) crash on purge of old articles, KMail
has a lot of instabilities for many users, Kicker too. KPDF has yet to prove
itself rocksolid with the poppler patch. |
I don't have any other experience with KDE than these sorts of issues. But judging by my KDE stability experience, Gentoo will never see another KDE release... Especially KMail. Nothing worked in that thing... Oh well, glad to see that the meaning of "stable" is taken to heart now. |
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codergeek42
Bodhisattva
Joined: 05 Apr 2004
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Location: Anaheim, CA (USA)
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| Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 10:22 pm Post subject: |
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Merged halfgaar's "When will KDE 3.5(.x) be stable?" thread to this one.
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 10:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Halcy0n wrote: | Most devs apply the logic that it will go stable when it is ready  We try to wait for any serious bugs to be resolved, and for the package to prove that it has no further issues before we deem it stable. So, like Earthwings said, it is hard for us to give an exact timetable most of the time. |
Has there been a change in policy for this? Because to be honest, I have had serious issues with lots of stable packages in the past (as I said in the thread that got merged with this one). |
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Halcy0n
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 2:06 am Post subject: |
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| halfgaar wrote: | | Halcy0n wrote: | | Most devs apply the logic that it will go stable when it is ready We try to wait for any serious bugs to be resolved, and for the package to prove that it has no further issues before we deem it stable. So, like Earthwings said, it is hard for us to give an exact timetable most of the time. |
Has there been a change in policy for this? Because to be honest, I have had serious issues with lots of stable packages in the past (as I said in the thread that got merged with this one). |
Well, we now have an x86 arch team to do testing and mark packages stable, so we hope that packages that are marked stable are a lot better than they used to be. We do our best to test them all as we mark them stable.
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jfb3
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Joined: 01 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:51 am Post subject: |
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gnac,
In my case the question was "Is KDE 3.5/3.5.1 stable enough *for me*?" The answer was yes quite sometime back.
Since I don't use kpdf (Acrobat), kmail (Thunderbird), or Akregator, the issues that keep the devs from marking the entirety of KDE as stable don't matter to me.
Thus the beauty of split ebuilds. Use what you need, leave the rest in the tree!
BTW, I've been using Firefox 1.5.0.1 and have had no stability problems with it either. |
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gnac
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Joined: 30 Jun 2003
Posts: 302
Location: Columbia River Gorge
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 6:36 am Post subject: |
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| jfb3 wrote: | | Since I don't use kpdf (Acrobat), kmail (Thunderbird), or Akregator, the issues that keep the devs from marking the entirety of KDE as stable don't matter to me. |
Where do you find what packages are holding up the stable release? I perused bugzilla, but didn't see any mentions of specific packages holding up stable. Did I miss it, or look in the wrong place?
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Paapaa
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:23 am Post subject: |
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| Earthwings wrote: | | Rule of thumb for an ebuild (!) to become stable is the day when there are no serious bugreports in bugzilla plus thirty days. |
How many developers actually follow the 30 day rule of thumb? Is that an official recommendation? I'm not indicating it is a good or bad guideline but is it actually used by any devs? |
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Earthwings
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:36 am Post subject: |
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| Paapaa wrote: | | Earthwings wrote: | | Rule of thumb for an ebuild (!) to become stable is the day when there are no serious bugreports in bugzilla plus thirty days. |
How many developers actually follow the 30 day rule of thumb? Is that an official recommendation? I'm not indicating it is a good or bad guideline but is it actually used by any devs? |
It's mentioned in the ebuild policy part of the developers handbook: | Quote: | Moving package versions from ~ARCH to ARCH
When a package version has proved stable for sufficient time and the Gentoo maintainer of the package is confident that the upgrade will not break a regular Gentoo user's machine, then it can be moved from ~ARCH to ARCH. An indication of the package's stability would be no verified or unresolved bug report for a month after the version's introduction.
It is up to the maintainer of the package to deem which versions are stable or if development versions should be in package.mask or left in ~arch.
You must also ensure that all the dependencies of such a package version are also in ARCH.
Warning: The ~ARCH step may only be ignored if and only if the concerned package version contains a security fix or is needed to fix an important bug in the Gentoo system. |
I don't have any statistics how many ebuilds follow this, sorry.
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Paapaa
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:49 am Post subject: |
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| Earthwings wrote: | | Paapaa wrote: | | How many developers actually follow the 30 day rule of thumb? Is that an official recommendation? I'm not indicating it is a good or bad guideline but is it actually used by any devs? |
It's mentioned in the ebuild policy part of the developers handbook: |
Thanks for the link and explanation! |
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Vlad.Sharp
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Joined: 08 Dec 2004
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Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:58 pm Post subject: |
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You just wonder sometimes...
Gentoo is all about choice. You choose your software, you choose the features, you choose what to compile it with, and you choose to configure it in your own way. However at some point on the road to chosen freedom you come to a point where you have to compromise between time it takes to get something running and the amount of time saved with going by the defaults. I assume at least a large part of Gentoo users are running Gentoo for the sake of getting the latest and greatest applications in a fairly stable format (on average, I'm not talking hardened or masked packages here).
However, I just tried Fedora Core 5 Test 3 (with packages from rawhide). Overall, except for the cost of network installation the system runs very well. Of course, with the exceptions of my nVidia graphics card, my Intel Wireless, ntfs and mp3 or DVD support anywhere. The thing that gets me every time is that I can't issue a command similar to "yum install "mp3 support" in amarok". No, I have to dig the web only to find that there are no ready rpm files for me to use if I want to use xine and amarok together. I could go and spend my time configuring it all, building SRPMs and then having it all nice and ready within a week - but next week new software gets released, and oh no, a new kernel version means I have to rebuild my modules by hand.
My point is this. KDE 3.5 has been released for a while now, and a lot of binary distributions have it available to use. It's even easier to emerge KDE 3.5 in Gentoo, taken, of course, that you're either running ~arch or you have the neccesary ebuild names in package.keywords. But it's still a small nuiscance.
My suggestion is three-fold. I am not criticising the Gentoo package maintainers in any way - except that maybe when some bug reports are being replied to the intensity of feeling perhaps needs to be lowered. Firstly, that users have the option, through an easily available interface, to apply their own patches to ebuilds. Secondly, that users have an official installation tool to easily switch between unstable, masked, or stable versions of their packages, which would be a front-end to package.unmask etc... And thirdly, that portage add better configuration customisation options for packages. My idea is something along the lines of different configurations for different versions that present sensible defaults to the user (just as the binary distributions do) - configurations which are not neccesarily many in number, but easily available to suit different needs. Basically, an extension to the already enormous ability to customize Gentoo. An improvent to the meta-distribution.
On a last note, the above is really something I think a lot of people would like to see. After all, Microsoft Windows works out of the box quite easily - you just install from CD, install a couple of drivers, install a couple of packages and run. Never mind the reboots - at least they're easier than editing wpa-supplicant.conf by hand. |
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | at least they're easier than editing wpa-supplicant.conf by hand. |
Debian often takes the course of preventing the user having to do any configuration. It just asks questions like "do you want this app to do this and this: yes/no" with some explanaition about what it does. But I really hate that approach, because it is never clear what the consequences are of either choice. The configfiles in turn, are autogenerated from "user friendly" config files, meaning that manual modification to the actual config file is quite difficult, because your change get overriden whenever the file is regenerated.
I really prefer the way Gentoo handles things. It doesn't try to hide the core of your system. On the contrary, you control it. Make me edit wpa-supplicant.conf over the agony of "welcome to the WPA wizard" anytime. However, I agree that a few more tools for specifying useflags or masks would be handy of course. The first thing I would welcome is a command to find out the reason a package is masked... Looking it up in the .mask files is a pain...
And of course, I also use Gentoo for the little things, like depedency based bootscripts, extensive package-tree, the world-file, the console commands with colors, etc... |
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Syntaxis
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| Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 5:48 am Post subject: |
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| halfgaar wrote: | | Debian often takes the course of preventing the user having to do any configuration. |
Any debconf-using package must indicate how important it is that a given question be shown to the user by way of the priority field, whose possible values are as follows:
| debconf-devel manpage wrote: | low - Very trivial items that have defaults that will work in the vast majority of cases; only control freaks see these.
medium - Normal items that have reasonable defaults.
high - Items that don't have a reasonable default.
critical - Items that will probably break the system without user intervention. Debconf decides if the question is actually displayed, based on its priority, and whether the user has seen it before, and which frontend is being used. If the question will not be displayed, debconf replies with code 30. |
However, despite the existence of the low and medium priorities, it's important to realise that Debian seeks only to shield the user from having to do any unnecessary configuration. Generally speaking, if a question has a reasonable default, then there shouldn't even be a debconf question for that option; the package should simply ship in that default state. The exception to this rule is when an issue that has no reasonable default already exists, in which case debconf use is already necessary and it thus costs nothing to add additional configurability to the package should the admin so choose:
| Steve Greenland wrote: | | If you have a package that is asking only medium and lower priority debconf questions, then debconf should not be used at all. Those priorities *exist* because there are packages that have a high-priority, non-defaultable question, and once you've broken the conffile system, you might as well include those questions. |
| halfgaar wrote: | | It just asks questions like "do you want this app to do this and this: yes/no" with some explanaition about what it does. |
The questions needn't necessarily be limited to "yes/no" answers; for instance, the Exult package prompts the user for the location of their copy of Ultima 7.
| halfgaar wrote: | | The configfiles in turn, are autogenerated from "user friendly" config files, meaning that manual modification to the actual config file is quite difficult, because your change get overriden whenever the file is regenerated. |
How is your ability to make manual modifications in any way impaired? You shouldn't ever have to worry about your changes being blown away. Section 10.7.3 of the Debian Policy Manual specifies that local changes to config files must be preserved at all costs, be it upon upgrade, install after remove, or dpkg-reconfigure.
Nor is it an all-or-nothing decision between the package's version of a configuration file and your own. Quite the contrary; when a package detects that a configuration file has been modified, the admin is presented with a variety of options:
| Code: | Configuration file \`$dest_file'
==> File on system created by you or by a script.
==> File also in package provided by package maintainer.
What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
Y or I : install the package maintainer's version
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
D : show the differences between the versions
3 or T : show a thre way difference between current, older,
and new versions of the file
M : Do a 3 way merge between current, older,
and new versions of the file [Very Experimental]
Z : start a new shell to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version. |
| halfgaar wrote: | | But I really hate that approach, because it is never clear what the consequences are of either choice. |
First off, I have to say that I've never had this problem. But, YMMV.
If a debconf question of high or critical priority does not provide you with sufficient information to make an informed choice, this is certainly worthy of a bug report, since the wrong decision could potentially break your system. (Of course, common sense is required - if you're e.g. installing Exim and you don't know a single thing about mail servers, then of course you won't understand the question, but in that case the problem is just lack of knowledge on your part). If, OTOH, the question is of medium or low priority, then by definition the default should do just fine and the fact that you don't what the question's asking should be taken as an indicator that you most likely don't need to know in the first place. A wishlist bug at best, unless you should later discover that the default was something utterly stupid.
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Genone
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| Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 6:20 am Post subject: |
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| halfgaar wrote: | | The first thing I would welcome is a command to find out the reason a package is masked... Looking it up in the .mask files is a pain... |
emerge will do that for you for any package in package.mask. |
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Tiger683
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Joined: 08 Jan 2005
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| Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 7:40 am Post subject: |
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| Genone wrote: | | halfgaar wrote: | | The first thing I would welcome is a command to find out the reason a package is masked... Looking it up in the .mask files is a pain... |
emerge will do that for you for any package in package.mask. |
Example:
| Quote: |
tiger683 ~# emerge =x11-libs/qt-3.3.5
Calculating dependencies
!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "=x11-libs/qt-3.3.5" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/qt-3.3.5 (masked by: package.mask)
# Gregorio Guidi <greg_g@gentoo.org> (19 Sep 2005)
# Qt-3.3.5 causes a lot of compilation failures.
# See bug #106402.
For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or
refer to the Gentoo Handbook.
tiger683 ~#
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 10:40 am Post subject: |
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Syntaxis,
I don't have a very good example ready of deb-conf questions, but you make valid points. My limited experience with debian also helps to confuse me The most confusing is the exim config I have on one of my servers. It has no exim.conf, only a lot of mini config files, even though I chose to use the monolithic config file. The config file that does exist is update-exim4.conf.conf, which is used to derrive the exim configuration from. How exactly that's done is not really transparent.
But still, I prefer the manual way of making configurations.
Anyway, this is not a thread about Debian versus Gentoo, so let's avoid culttering this topic. If you want to enlighten me about Debian, feel free to spam me in any way
| Quote: | | emerge will do that for you for any package in package.mask. |
Hey, that is new for me ! I already removed beep-media-player from my system, so I can't test how it would react about a package already on your system. But, in the last emerge --pretend run, I can't remember seeing such a message. |
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Carlo
Developer
Joined: 12 Aug 2002
Posts: 3356
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| Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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| halfgaar wrote: | | Has there been a change in policy for this? Because to be honest, I have had serious issues with lots of stable packages in the past (as I said in the thread that got merged with this one). |
No. We decide based on the ebuild policy and the problems we're aware of, by noticing some of them ourselves, but mostly relying on you filing bugs about issues, we try to reproduce. Of course the whole KDE includes a huge number of applications and it makes a difference, if e.g. KMail is very broken or Konqueror crashes on a single website, which doesn't pass a validity check. There are also a number of known bugs, which apparently "never" get fixed upstream for the one or the other reason.
| Vlad.Sharp wrote: | | Gentoo is all about choice. |
This term is stressed too much. You can choose to shoot yourself in your foot, but that's your problem then. The last time someone looked at the desktop related bugs, the percentage of invalid ones were 20% and dealing with that is more a problem than the users choice of one toe less is worth it. Gentoo is about flexibility/customizing, but not necessarily choice.
| Vlad.Sharp wrote: | | I assume at least a large part of Gentoo users are running Gentoo for the sake of getting the latest and greatest applications in a fairly stable format (on average, I'm not talking hardened or masked packages here). |
I think this assumption is wrong. I have seen a lot more threads alike "Gentoo loosing quality", "wanna have a super stable tree" than "Gentoo being not so bleeding edge anymore".
| Vlad.Sharp wrote: | | My point is this. KDE 3.5 has been released for a while now, and a lot of binary distributions have it available to use. It's even easier to emerge KDE 3.5 in Gentoo, taken, of course, that you're either running ~arch or you have the neccesary ebuild names in package.keywords. But it's still a small nuiscance. |
If you really want the bleeding edge, run ~arch. All distributions ship a KDE 3.5 version with major issues, like e.g. users facing a suddenly emtpy addressbook.
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halfgaar
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Joined: 22 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | I think this assumption is wrong. I have seen a lot more threads alike "Gentoo loosing quality", "wanna have a super stable tree" than "Gentoo being not so bleeding edge anymore". |
Perhaps the quality is decreasing because the bleeding edge is increasing
This reminds me of a quote I read about Red Hat years ago, while I was still using Slackware. It was along the lines of "Red Hat may be bleeding edge, but it leaves the bleeding up to the users." Let's just hope Gentoo will not follow that policy... |
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firephoto
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| Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:56 am Post subject: |
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Since we have to reuse posts.....
I said earlier elsewhere......
It works great.
kontact crashes (closes abruptly) sometimes due to something akregator is doing, once a week or less, kontact running 16 hours a day or more.
kmail seems 100% here but others claim problems (?)
Kopete is kopete but the out of branch version (0.12) will be a better bet when it's released
superkaramba works good, no issues that I've encountered
kicker hasn't crashed in a long time
konqueror is used 99% of the time and works good, still some webpages that are broken or serve up incorrect pages to it though.
kget integration with konq is fine
bookmark handling is more dynamic and updates with the toolbar happen as the changes are made
desktop wallpaper is handled on a per desktop, per display manner
kmenu layout is a little simpler
media handling works as expected, mounts, unmounts, ejects
remote ssh, ftp, webdav, local http, zerconf, all work fine
I can't think of anything that's broke off the top of my head, and most certainly it's in better shape than any version of 3.4 ever was.
I wouldn't get your hopes up on it going stable any time soon though, too much nitpicking and no credibility or recognition given to non-stable testers and their results. I think this pressure for perfection comes from those outside of the kde herd though unfortunately.
* I'm not saying it's a bad thing to try to achieve super stability but when it involves putting effort into what has already got blessed "stable" rather than the effort going into the newer version, and neither is ahead of the other in terms of stability. Also I saw in one of the bugs mentioned that kpdf was a big issue, and I'll agree that it is but it cannot be the reason for holding back the rest of kde since it's no longer supported by kde upstream as soon as it was patched to use poplar and upstream made this very clear.
There isn't anything killing systems, or causing havoc with 3.5, let 3.5.2 come out in a week or whenever, see that it works and mark it stable. Enough with the nonsense that older means better.
*edit
| irondog wrote: | | Window focus behavioir in KDE 3.5.0 / 3.5.1 is terrably broken. Windows pop-up in front of each other at very strange moments This is not a small bug. |
I've never seen that here and I also don't see any gentoo or kde bugs relating to this. Do you have a way to reproduce this behavior? I'd like to test it if you do.
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irondog
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Location: Voor mijn TV. Achter mijn pc.
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| Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 9:07 am Post subject: |
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| firephoto wrote: | | I've never seen that here and I also don't see any gentoo or kde bugs relating to this. Do you have a way to reproduce this behavior? I'd like to test it if you do. |
The Desktop Access (Show Desktop) button acts weird. When you press this and open up another window everything pops-up again. I'll try to find some other ways to prove that it acts weird sometimes.
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firephoto
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| Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 9:14 am Post subject: |
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| irondog wrote: | | The Desktop Access (Show Desktop) button acts weird. When you press this and open up another window everything pops-up again. I'll try to find some other ways to prove that it acts weird sometimes. |
I kind of thought that was how it was suppose to work otherwise you would get half your windows appearing while the other half appeared. 
I have noticed some mouse focus issues but it seemed to be X related and have to do with clicking or not clicking, seemed like presses would get missed and a release event would occur sometimes. Could be the way kde grabs those events too.
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halfgaar
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| Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 10:25 am Post subject: |
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| firephoto wrote: |
media handling works as expected, mounts, unmounts, ejects |
Do you use ivman? My KDE currently has no media:/ support (too long a story why), but I can't unmount anything as a normal user that is automaticly mounted. As soon as ivman mounts something, only root (or the ivman user) can unmount it. I've made a post about it here. It's very annoying, and seems to be a design flaw in the whole ivman thing. I think I liked fstab-sync better. |
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Carlo
Developer
Joined: 12 Aug 2002
Posts: 3356
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| Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:28 pm Post subject: |
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| firephoto wrote: | | I wouldn't get your hopes up on it going stable any time soon though, too much nitpicking and no credibility or recognition given to non-stable testers and their results. I think this pressure for perfection comes from those outside of the kde herd though unfortunately. |
You're wrong. Please stop making such wild assumptions. We decide based on the bugs we're aware of, that's all.
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