Hello all, the purpose of this mail is to explain a bit, from a user point of view, the upcoming C++ ABI transition for KDE: when will it start, and how will it affect you. If after reading this you still have doubts, please bring them up and some member of the KDE packaging team will try to address them.
* * * What ~~~~ As a user, you'll just notice that some library packages have been renamed, and that trying to dist-upgrade them will make apt want to remove a lot of stuff. For example, libqt3c102-mt will become libqt3-mt; libarts1, libarts1c2; and kdelibs4, kdelibs4c2. The explanation as for why is this necessary, and other technical details, can be found elsewhere if you're curious (e.g., Matthias Klose's mails in d-d-a). When ~~~~ Real soon now. We've uploaded a transitioned Qt already, and as soon as it's compiled in all arches we'll start uploading arts and kdelibs, and the rest of KDE will follow. If Qt or kdelibs has trouble compiling with GCC 4.0 in some arches, things could get delayed a bit, though. KDE 3.4.2 ~~~~~~~~~ As KDE 3.4.2 has been recently released, we've decided that these transitioned packages we'll be uploading will be 3.4.2 already, instead of 3.4.1 or 3.3.2. Christopher Martin has been preparing most of the 3.4.2 modules in SVN, so we're mostly ready. That for the good news, yay! On the other hand, since there won't be 3.4.2 packages compiled with GCC 3.3, you'll have to actually wait a bit longer to be able to install the packages (see below), though not as long as if we were uploading 3.4.1 instead. Which takes us to... When will we be done? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Basically, the thing will be 100% finished when KDE 3.4.2 is ready to enter testing, which can be roughly translated to "when every package depending on kdelibs4 has been recompiled to depend on kdelibs4c2 instead". Now, please read this paragraph carefully: even when all of KDE 3.4.2 official modulels have been uploaded, there'll still probably be some applications in unstable that will depend on kdelibs4, and their maintainers will have to fix that. If you use one of these applications (and chances are you do), you won't be able to install KDE 3.4.2 until that application gets recompiled against kdelibs4c2, unless you decide to temporarily remove it. In the testing distribution, this is assured not to happen (except exceptionally). But hey, we don't expect it to be that bad. Most maintainers will upload fixed packages in a timely manner, and for those who don't, we will hopefully prepare NMUs to make the transition go faster. Final recommendations ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In my opinion, the best you can do is to ignore KDE updates in sid until we get back to you on this list and say, "hey, it seems KDE is in a mostly useable state now, with these gotchas". To achieve this, you can either don't dist-upgrade at all, cherry pick with a package manager like aptitude or synaptic which packages to upgrade, do "apt-get upgrade" instead of "dist-upgrade", and/or put libarts1 and kdelibs4 on hold. Or you may even want to consider temporarily switcthing to Etch (testing). And, finally: please, please, please, don't file bugs against KDE packages regarding them being uninstallable, or them crashing, until the above mentioned mail is sent (the "KDE mostly useable now" one). Those bugs will be well known by us, are expected in sid, and all they manage is to waste our time and annoy us a bit. Greatings from the Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers, -- Adeodato Simó EM: asp16 [ykwim] alu.ua.es | PK: DA6AE621 It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]