Hameleers: What's cooking? [LWN.net]

Slackware volunteer Eric Hameleers looks at some of his packaging projects. He's hit some bumps with the KDE 4.7.x series which could have major impact.

The new series 4.7.x proves to be a bigger challenge for Slackware. We saw that the 4.6. series moved away from HAL and instead requires udisks/upower (which was the reason for sticking with 4.5.5 in Slackware 13.37). The KDE developers have now finalized their move from CVS to GIT as the source control and version management system. The result is less than optimally arranged for packagers. The old "monolithic" source tarballs are now being split into many additional tarballs for individual applications. This means we have rewrite our scripts and possibly add a lot of packages. While this may be advantageous for some other distros with dedicated packaging teams, for us Slackware people it is a time for decisions.

After talking to Pat Volkerding, I announced on the KDE packager mailing list that we are considering the same solution as was chosen for GNOME in the past: remove KDE from Slackware if it proves to become a maintenance burden. I can not yet say anything final about this. For the time being, I have decided not to create Slackware packages for the KDE Software Compilation 4.7.x.

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Hameleers: What's cooking?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 5:05 UTC (Thu) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link]

Bravo, ingenious decision, anyone really need a gigantic desktop environment can always build them by hand later.

Slackware can redirect the resource elsewhere to reach their goal: ease of use and stability.

Hameleers: What's cooking?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 15:29 UTC (Thu) by anscal (subscriber, #74466) [Link]

I find Slackware to be one of the most stable distribution in existence, to say nothing of other qualities such as simplicity and customizability.

You can find a more detailed discussion of the future of KDE in Slackware in the distribution's (semi)official forum, namely in this post http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/kick... , which includes replies from Mr. Hameleers ("Alien Bob") and Mr. Volkerding ("volkerdi"), as well as a link to the original discussion of the issue in a kde mailing list.