Now that KDE 4.1 has been officially announced, I don’t feel I’ll be stealing any thunder to tell you that Arch Linux has had KDE 4.1 in [extra] (the main repository for non-essential software) since yesterday evening.
The KDE 3 desktop has gone (the maintainer of the KDE packages has no wish to attempt to support both), but kdelibs 3.5 has moved to kdelibs3 and several KDE 3 applications (such as Konversation and K3b) that have no stable KDE 4 releases or equivalents yet are still available.
One of the main advantages of Arch’s “rolling updates” system means that, once a stable and usable version of a piece of software is released and has been tested, it can become a part of the distribution immediately without having to wait for the next scheduled release.
Personally, I’m running trunk (and have been since plasma was vaguely usable sometime last Autumn), but it will be useful to have a basically vanilla 4.1 release to test bug reports on. And it also means I have fewer dependencies to compile myself.
So: much thanks to Pierre Schmitz for his work packaging KDE 4.1 in time for its release. This is one reason why I love Arch so much.
[edit] See comments for info on kdemod [/edit]
29th July 2008 at 4:02 pm |
Hey,
nice to see a KDE Dev who uses Arch
And just to inform you:
The KDEmod packages have also been updated to 4.1 [1]… Also our philosophy has changed a bit, and we are now working together with Pierre to ensure that both the Arch KDE packages and ours will rock even more
KDEmod will stay on vanilla KDE starting with 4.1, and we also provide separate packages with debug symbols for all of our KDE packages, so you dont have to recompile anymore if you want to debug stuff
Together with our new buildsystem (to be released soon), we are pretty sure that it is a lot more solid than our KDE3 packages, which were just a mess to be honest…
And btw: For all KDE3 lovers: We are currently preparing a new build of our KDE3 packages, so it will not be gone in Arch…
Greetings
Jan
[1] http://kdemod.ath.cx/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=871
29th July 2008 at 4:03 pm |
FWIW, KDEmod will not discontinue the kde 3 packages.
29th July 2008 at 4:50 pm |
@Jan: that’s good to hear – I’ll probably switch to kdemod for the debug packages when it goes stable. Separate debug packages has always been one of the gaping holes in Arch, to be honest, and it’s nice to see them being introduced for kdemod.
29th July 2008 at 11:05 pm |
@randomguy3: I have the same opinion about the debug stuff, especially because Arch is a vanilla + bleeding edge distro which makes it perfect for reporting bugs, at least theoretically…
Well, i have submitted makepkg patch to the Arch bugtracker, lets see what the Arch Devs think about it…
Btw, KDE 4.1 is now in our stable [core] repo, more info here: http://www.kdemod.ath.cx/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=891
Greetings
Jan
30th July 2008 at 5:53 am |
Awesome. I am using kdemod4 now, but I may have to switch over to [extra] to see what goodness is in store.
30th July 2008 at 8:22 pm |
I was swearing so much today. I had kdemod installed, and of course pacman -Su wanted to get rid of kde3 to upgrade to kde4.1 but couldn’t. In the end I just uninstalled whole of kdemod and went on with the upgrade.
Good thing is – 4.1 is pretty stable and quite well working so far, so I **never looked back**.