Thursday, April 18, 2013

kdepim-4.4 (kmail1) in Gentoo - unsupported, dying, dead

Bitrot is accumulating, and while we've tried to keep kdpim-4.4 running in Gentoo as long as possible, the time is slowly coming to say goodbye. In effect this is triggered by annoying problems like these:
There are probably many more such bugs around, where incompatibilities between kdepim-4.4 and kdepimlibs of more recent releases occur or other software updates have led to problems. Slowly it's getting painful, and definitely more painful than running a recent kdepim-4.10 (which has in my opinion improved quite a lot over the last major releases).
Please be prepared for the following steps:
  • end of april 2013, all kdepim-4.4 packages in the Gentoo portage tree will be package.masked 
  • end of may 2013, all kdepim-4.4 packages in the Gentoo portage tree will be removed
  • afterwards, we will finally be able to simplify the eclasses a lot by removing the special handling
We still have the kdepim-4.7 upgrade guide around, and it also applies to the upgrade from kdepim-4.4 to any later version. Feel free to improve it or suggest improvements.

R.I.P. kmail1.

6 comments:

  1. no problem with old bits retiring, but current kmail is still in a sad state, or rather akonadi (imap sync silently dies, resuming from sleep hangs sync also and so on). Do you still use kontact for your daily pim? And i checked the calendar - yes we are in 2013, isn't that crazy? =[

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  2. I would agree with d-fens... Don't know who uses new kmail but they're in for serious problems. Month ago akonadi started crashing on its own and it's not the first time it broke. It appears the underlying MySQL database broke, judging from stack trace... I want my old stable kmail where I knew where and how it stores my data.

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    1. Well... write patches! People are complaining but noone ever seriously attempted to keep kmail1 alive or improve it further (while some are wasting their time on kde-3...)

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  3. Any ideas what Debian does different so they don't run into these problems?

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    1. Well, kde proper is still at 4.8.4 in debian as far as I can see. When we in Gentoo were at 4.8 things were still fine too... I don't see any obvious patches in the debian patch tracker.

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  4. Update... In the bug report linked above, Kevin Kofler pointed to the patch from Fedora 15 that fixes the kleopatra issue. Thanks! One down, N to go...

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