[arch-general] Anyway to revert back to KDE 3.5.9? (Don't Panic)

[David Rosenstrauch]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 8:35 PM, James Rayner <iphitus at iphitus.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Nigel Henry <cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr> wrote:
>>> Some days ago I ran the updates for my Don't Panic install, which said that
>>> KDE 3.5.9 was being upgraded to KDE4. I let this go ahead having asked on the
>>> list if there were likely to be any problems with KDE4.
>>>
>>> I also have recently installed Fedora 9 which comes with KDE4 as default, so
>>> this is not a pop at Archlinux, but more with KDE4, which I'm finding is
>>> virtually unuseable. I'm posting this from Fedora Core 2, which has KDE
>>> 3.2.2-14.FC2.2.legacy Red Hat, and apart from the odd konqueror crash when
>>> accessing certain web sites, there are no problems. KDE4 is a whole different
>>> ball game.
>> I hear a lot of this, but never any specifics.
>>
>> And a search for KDE or even KDE4 on the bug tracker doesn't bring
>> many bugs up. Not ideal search terms given the amount of apps, but
>> you'd expect more than 10 results for something "virtually unusable"
>>
>> So maybe it'd be a good idea to file bugs about this "virtually unusable" DE.
>>
> 
> Or pull the old PKGBUILDs from SVN and create your own repo housing
> the old KDE packages.

I started looking into doing just that.  I started thinking that's not 
sustainable on an ongoing basis though, for a few reasons:

* I imagine after a while, many dependent packages in the Arch repos 
would get upgraded to incompatible versions and break the old KDE.

* Ditto for KDE-based apps in the Arch repos.  I imagine they'd start to 
break as they got updated for KDE 4.  So then it'd be necessary to start 
maintaining them in the unofficial repo too.  Looked like it could turn 
into a big job.

I also started looking into a way to build KDE3 so that it could be 
installed side-by-side with KDE4 (i.e., install it into /opt/kde3).  I 
even started to build some of the packages.

But then I traded a couple of emails with one of the kdemod devs about 
that approach, and he seemed to think installing into /opt/kde3 wouldn't 
work and it was a bad idea.  And that my efforts would be better 
directed towards helping them maintain kdemod3.  (Perhaps rightly so.)

After that I got busy and haven't been able to follow up.

I still would very much like to get a viable kde3 repo up and running 
though.  Would love to hear any suggestions/thoughts anyone might have 
on it.

Thanks,

DR