Upgrading to KDE 3.5.7: Frequently Asked Questions

1.  Introduction

For most architectures supported by Gentoo the current versions of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments went into the stable branch a few days ago.

Together with this update to GNOME 2.18.2 and KDE 3.5.7, new versions of the expat and curl libraries were stabilised as well. The now stable versions 2.0.1 of expat and 7.16.4 of curl are not compatible with the previous stable versions. This is why a major part of the packages installed on a Gentoo desktop system need to be re-installed to link them against the new versions of the libraries. To keep the affort needed as low as possible, Gentoo's KDE and GNOME herds, as well as the architecture teams, stabilised expat, curl and the said desktop environments in one go.

When you are updating your system it might happen that some package updates fail, because older applications or libraries are still linked against older, no longer available versions of expat and curl. The most common error up to now occurs in the configure phase, checking for XML::Parser... configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool. In this case the fix was to re-install XML-Parser manually.

Generally we recommend using the revdep-rebuild -X command (available in the app-portage/gentoolkit package) instead of the usual world update via emerge for the upcoming update of the desktop environments.
This makes sure that all packages depending on older versions of expat and curl are updated. If further issues occur, especially related to intltool, install XML-Parser and gettext again, followed by an update of the system via revdep-rebuild -X and a world update.

2.  Short FAQ

Q: But why don't the developers fix the expat bug??? They are all slackers!

A: We can't fix your system and rebuild everything to link against the new versions. That's up to you.

Also, there is a warning in the expat ebuild:

ewarn "Please note that the soname of the library changed!"
ewarn "If you are upgrading from a previous version you need"
ewarn "to fix dynamic linking inconsistencies by executing:"
ewarn "revdep-rebuild --library libexpat.so.0"

For more information see the Gentoo forums.

Q: <kde-base/kdesktop-3.5.6-r1 is blocking kde-base/kdebase-kioslaves-3.5.7-r1

A: This simply means that recent versions of kde-base/kdebase-kioslaves don't work with older versions of kde-base/kdesktop. This can be solved by updating kdesktop first (emerge -u kdesktop) or by unmerging it and then updating kdebase-kioslaves (emerge -C kdesktop && emerge -u kdebase-kioslaves). These instructions apply to similiar blockages.

Q: kde-base/ksync is blocking kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.7-r2

A: kdelibs-3.5.7-r2 now provides the functionality of ksync. There is no need to have ksync installed any longer. Just unmerge it (emerge -C ksync).

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