It seems that since kde4 recently went stable someone is attacking the portage tree with a chainsaw. eg. !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "media-libs/libkdcraw" have been masked. !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request: - media-libs/libkdcraw-0.1.9 (masked by: package.mask) /usr/portage/new/profiles/package.mask: # Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> (25 Oct 2009) # Replaced by: # # >=media-gfx/digikam-0.10 # kde-base/gwenview # >=media-gfx/kphotoalbum-4 # >=media-plugins/kipi-plugins-0.6 # # Masked for removal in 30 days. - media-libs/libkdcraw-0.1.4-r2 (masked by: package.mask) revdep-rebuild shows I need to rebuild this but I no longer can without overriding these hardmasks. similarly for gwenview (which admittedly has bugs) for which all recommended alternatives are KDE4 derivatives. This list is not exhaustive , it is an indication of a new policy that seems to be in place to no longer fully support kde3 and to force users to update. The problem is that while kde4 may be classes as stable many kde based programs are not! k3b - still showing ALPHA. kdevelop 3.9.95 , ie not a stable release. I don't run a full kde system but use several kde dependant tools. I do not see that it is necessary to doubly bloat my system with TWO versions of this huge package set. It would make sense for me to remain using kde3 until the majority to the kde family has moved to kde4 and is stable. I have no pressing need or interest in kde4. I ask that you look closely at the implications of this agressive tree pruning and the packages that are now on death row. It is to the credit of gentoo that stable kde3 has been maintained to now when most other distros have been playing update wars and throwing out releases with severely broken, unstable software by prematurely moving to kde4. PLease look at this again. Reproducible: Always
Easy. KDE 3 isn't supported by the kde project anymore. The Gentoo KDE herd has noone still using it, and no users stepped up to help out. So we cannot support kde3 anymore and will slowly phase it out. If you don't like that you can either help out or move forward to this decade ;)
thanks for explaining where gentoo stands on this. I did not know that kde were not even supporting kde3 any more. >> or move forward to this decade ;) more like pre-empting the next decade, since some of this is not even stable yet. It seems part of the mad rush forwards that is increasingly the hallmark of linux, playing for bigger release numbers is now more important than tested , stable software. I've seen most of the other mainstream distros jumping into kde4 because it looks pretty even if major features did not work correctly. I don't think I need to catalogue the failures that policy induced. At one time the touchstone of linux was stability. It now seems pretty is more important. thanks
