Gentoo KDE Project

1.  Project Description

The KDE project consists of two herds that manage the KDE and Qt ebuilds within Gentoo, which include all KDE applications. However, some KDE applications might belong to function specific herds due to the fact that the KDE project cannot maintain all of them properly, as there are too many applications and many of them are not used by the KDE maintainers. Nevertheless, the project does support the teams that do manage these applications, and will ensure that they use the KDE eclasses appropriately.

2.  Project Goals

The goal of the Gentoo KDE team is to provide working support for all packages supported by the KDE Project. We also support as many underlying packages as necessary in order to have a properly working KDE environment.

3.  Current situation

The latest stable version of KDE in the official Portage Tree is 3.5.8. It has been marked stable on all stable-supporting architectures: alpha, amd64, hppa, ia64, ppc, ppc64, sparc, x86.

If you're having problems updating to a KDE version >3.5.7, please read this FAQ.

4.  KDE 4

If you are a bold and daring Gentoo user, you might want to try the versions of KDE 4 which are now in the main Portage tree and are masked. Note that KDE 4.0.x versions will not be removed from package.mask.

The KDE herd maintains a KDE overlay for experimental releases and ebuilds, mostly for KDE 4. You'll get all information about the overlay at the official website which is located at http://genkdesvn.mailstation.de. You can get support for these overlays in #genkdesvn.

Currently, KDE 4 is in the main portage tree. Starting with KDE 4 we only support split ebuilds. For those beyond bold and daring but rather suicidal, live SVN ebuilds are provided in the KDE overlay which you'll recognise by the version scm.
These -scm ebuilds use a new EAPI, wittingly called kdebuild-1, which is currently exclusively supported by the package manager Paludis.
If you're interested in the new features you can find our official kdebuild-1 page here.

5.  Meeting logs and summaries

The KDE herd holds regular meetings in #gentoo-kde on the first Thursday of every month at 18:30 UTC. Each meeting's agenda will be announced in the topic of #gentoo-kde.
Summaries of each meeting will be available here, along with raw logs for public viewing.

6.  Support and assistance

There are several ways to get support with KDE related issues. You can:

• Join #gentoo-kde on the Freenode IRC network. You'll find some of the herd members there most of the time.
• Address your concerns in the Gentoo Forums. Not all of us are avid forums users but many experienced users and some developers are likely to be able to help you.
• Of course, you can also file a bug report at Gentoo's Bugzilla (do not forget to add your emerge --info and the output of emerge -pv <package>).
• For your convenience, we provide a few documents about how to install KDE on Gentoo:
  • The KDE Split Ebuilds HOWTO
  • The KDE Configuration HOWTO
  • Upgrading to KDE 3.5.7/8: Frequently Asked Questions
  • KDE 4.0 Guide

7.  How *you* can help

The main thing that needs doing is trawling through the current open bugs and finding those that are stale, or those that have an equivalent on KDE's Bugzilla.

You'll find a current list of open bugs here: http://tinyurl.com/3bpdlv.

For those that are stale, you should ask if on the bug if the problem remains in the latest version. If someone has already done this and the reporter (or someone else experiencing the same problem) has not replied it should be marked NEEDINFO.

Also, some bugs have been filed from people using the sabayon overlay or others. These need to be reproduced by someone using vanilla ebuilds (i.e., not from an unstable overlay). Pointing this out on the bug is likely to prompt one of us to close it as INVALID until someone can reproduce it. It would also be nice if you could ask the reporter to report it to that overlay's bug tracker. For Sabayon it's http://bugs.sabayonlinux.org.

Speaking of bugs - now you can become a Herd Tester, too! You'll find all the necessary information about what a Herd Tester is and does on the KDE Herd Testers Project Page.

Finally, it would be great to chat to you on IRC, too - this is how we normally get to know each other. Please drop into #gentoo-kde and chat with us. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to /query individual team members or ask in #gentoo-kde, #gentoo-desktop or #gentoo.

8.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

9.  Subprojects

The KDE project has the following subprojects:

10.  Herds

The KDE project maintains the following herds: