Gentoo is old, broken

It's in the kdesvn-portage overlay, available with "layman -a kdesvn-portage".

I'm personally running 4.1.67 (4.2 alpha) right now and it works great! Sure, it's not an official stable release but at least for me it works much better than 4.1.1 did.

Gentoo, like any active distribution, has its problems, but I've been
running it since 1H2004, it's one of the few distributions I can really
feel comfortable with, and at this point, there's a good chance I'll
still be running it in 2014.

As for leading/bleeding, well, I'm a KDE user that switched to Gentoo
back when my previous distribution got behind on KDE, so I know the
feeling. However, I wasn't as generally comfortable with that previous
distribution as I am with Gentoo, and unlike that previous distribution,
there's Gentoo packages of the latest KDE available, just not in the
official tree ATM.

What's really going on with Gentoo and KDE, however, is that like any
decently out-front distribution (Fedora users will recognize themselves
here, as will Debian unstable users...), sometimes that out-front-ness
means not all the various parts play together so well. In this specific
case, the Gentoo/KDE folks decided to use some new and still under
development package manager features for KDE 4.x. As such, neither those
PM features nor the packages that depend on them are yet stable enough
for stable, or even ~arch (corresponding to Debian testing). Gentoo uses
separate overlays for much of their development work (corresponding to
Debian unstable), and that's where you'll find much of the real
experimental stuff happening. The Gentoo/KDE project just happens to be
doing some rather experimental stuff with their KDE 4 packages ATM, so
that's where the KDE 4 packages live, in the appropriate overlays.

As anyone following the Gentoo-dev list and current ~arch portage will
know, however, portage 2.2-rcs have been running experimental
EAPI-2-preX, and I believe Gentoo council just approved the final EAPI-2,
which was in the portage 2.2-rc10 I just got in this morning's upgrades.
Because the KDE 4.1.x ebuilds depended on EAPI-2 features and a final
approved EAPI-2 wasn't available, they were not allowed in the tree. Now
that it is, they'll probably make their way into the tree and into ~arch
relatively quickly.

As mentioned above and by others, however, one of the great things about
Gentoo is its flexibility in this regard. There are in fact three
entirely different package managers to choose from, the official portage,
and two others, thus the EAPI standards, and the requirement for council
approval thereof (which in turn requires support by the official PM,
portage), before packages using a new EAPI can be put in the official
tree. With Gentoo's flexibility, however, there's absolutely nothing
stopping those who want to from using the other package managers which
often implement new features sooner, and/or from using any of these
development overlays, and/or from compiling directly from upstream
sources. In fact, the latter, compiling directly from upstream sources,
is far easier on Gentoo, due to its source-based nature, than most other
popular distributions, which are generally binary based.

As for "often emerges simply break", well, so did packages on my previous
distribution, and well, so do they on any distribution, at least for the
folks that would be concerned about KDE 4 at all let alone KDE 4.1.x,
that is, the folks who like to try newer packages before all the bugs and
regressions get worked out (and the KDE devs are pointing at 4.2 for many
of them, so their obviously not all worked out yet there). The great
thing about Gentoo for the intended audience, people not afraid to use
the command line and edit config files directly once in awhile, however,
is that fixing things when they /do/ break tends to be far easier,
because (1) the settings tend to be exposed at far more accessible a
level, and (2) the system is designed for people to actually change the
settings, so they tend to be much more documented and alternate configs
are far more likely to be tested, than they often are on many
distributions.

I know one thing. I've had far less problems keeping my system up to
date and functional with Gentoo and its incremental upgrade system, than
I did with distribution X and its "upgrade all at once" every few months,
system.

So while others are welcome to move on if they don't find Gentoo right
for them, I rather like it here, and it seems there's enough like me,
both users and developers, so I'm planning to stick around for awhile.
=:^)

Duncan

So how many times have you opened a stabilization request? or even mentioned to the maintainer that the current stable is broken? developers don't scour the forum for bug reports.