back in bug #3827, startkde was patched to add this line: [ -d .kde ] && /bin/mv .kde .kde.backup The gentoo standard is to have .kde as a symlink to some the real kde configuration directory. The intended purpose of this line is to move any existing .kde directory out of the way before creating the symlink in its place. /bin/mv should therefore only ever get run once, the first time a gentoo user runs startkde using a non-gentoo home directory. However it has an unintended effect. The [ -d .kde ] test will also succeed if .kde is a symlink to a directory. This is the normal case, so /bin/mv always gets run. The first time a gentoo users runs startkde, it creates the .kde3.3 directory and a symlink to it named .kde The second time a gentoo user runs startkde, it moves that symlink to the name .kde.backup, and recreates a new symlink named .kde The third (and subsequent) time a gentoo user runs startkde, it moves the existing .kde symlink *into* the .kde.backup directory. All current gentoo kde users therefore have two spurious symlinks: ~/.kde.backup and ~/.kde3.3/.kde The fix is to change the startkde patch to only perform that move if the .kde directory is not a symlink: if [ -d .kde ] && [ ! -h .kde ] && /bin/mv .kde .kde.backup
Exact! See bug 40698.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 40698 ***
