Outdated Desktop Environments

[shadow53]

Is there a reason Funtoo seems to be lagging behind with certain software? The one I notice in particular is with desktop environments: Plasma is only available as version 5.12.3 and LXQt is only available as 0.11.

I can somewhat understand Plasma 5.12, since that is the LTS release, though I'd like to see the improvements from 5.13 on my Funtoo system. 5.12.6 is the latest LTS though, so it's still behind the current LTS. LXQt being on 0.11 means two years of not being updated, with the project now on 0.13.

Is this due to following Gentoo (I notice 5.12.5 and 0.11 being the latest "stable" ebuilds, respectively) and not bringing over the "testing" ebuilds? A lack of manpower to keep these things updated? If the former, would it be possible to have non-default "current" branches of DE kits so we can get the latest stable version?

I notice that I could subscribe to the KDE and Qt Gentoo testing overlays, but I assume they are called "testing" for a reason and would rather not chance random breakages from unstable build scripts.

[palica]

1. using kits to deliver software => not being fully rolling release (semi-rolling or release based) more info: https://www.funtoo.org/News:New_Ports-2017_tree_and_Kits

2. lack of manpower

but you can file a bug here: bugs.funtoo.org and see what happens.

[shadow53]

20 hours ago, palica said:

but you can file a bug here: bugs.funtoo.org and see what happens.

Just tried to log in to file a bug using the same credentials as the forums. I was told my username/password is incorrect and to contact the JIRA administrators to request an account.

[palica]

upper/lower case? if that makes no difference write to support@funtoo.org with details.

[shadow53]

It was the uppercase in the username. I didn't realize it got lowercased when I registered.

[calrama]

On 14/08/2018 at 8:31 AM, shadow53 said:

I notice that I could subscribe to the KDE and Qt Gentoo testing overlays, but I assume they are called "testing" for a reason and would rather not chance random breakages from unstable build scripts.

Gentoo has KDE Plasma 5.13 (and qt 5.11) in normal portage, no need to use testing.

PS: You could also use the ebuilds in my overlay, if you don't want to sync the whole Gentoo tree (they are imported from Gentoo), though they may be behind slightly in the release version (the 'x' in 5.13.x)

[drobbins]

We need maintainers for non-GNOME desktop environments who will help us test and maintain kits. Please let me know if you are interested in doing this. The primary reason the DE's are out-of-date is because we need some people to volunteer to maintain the DE's and apply funtoo-style testing to them. We don't want to just track Gentoo's changes since we then have no process to ensure things are working as things get updated.

[shadow53]

22 hours ago, drobbins said:

We need maintainers for non-GNOME desktop environments who will help us test and maintain kits. Please let me know if you are interested in doing this. The primary reason the DE's are out-of-date is because we need some people to volunteer to maintain the DE's and apply funtoo-style testing to them. We don't want to just track Gentoo's changes since we then have no process to ensure things are working as things get updated.

I mentioned this on the bug tracker as well:

I'm willing to help out, I'm just not sure how to go about starting that. Specifically, I'm not sure what "funtoo-style" testing is and how or whether I would do that. Also, if I have updated ebuilds, would I attach them to their own issues on JIRA, a single issue (e.g. "Updated LXQt ebuilds"), or give a link to a git overlay?

I've decided to start working on updating LXQt, since that looks like a more manageable task right now. I'm only going to do manual testing and any tests included with the source code, unless there's more to "funtoo-style" testing that I should do.

[Oleg Vinichenko]

Main reason is to have users who are experienced KDE users and understand about possible quirks during updates. This does no necessarily means that  its needed to be good at writing ebuilds, but it' s of course much better if you can. 

The way it can be tested is using the generation of a tree that will contain the updated stack of what is forming the KDE. How to  perform this is described in: https://www.funtoo.org/Local_Development_Setup

Assuming that you have KDE of older kit branch installed, then, you can generate a new tree that track gentoo master ebuilds for KDE. Or LXQT. Then, you can try updating and hunting for update troubles that can be faced during this step. There  could be quite a list of inter-connected issues, considering that KDE and QT are big projects. Eliminating and fixing such pitfalls and also documenting about upgrade steps are the basics. When it's known to be reliable, then, the kit can be locked down and released. Next releases can be then considered to work on. It very much looking as semi-rolling. It can be helped and supported by us with technical difficulties and questions.

[safulkin]

I'm Mate DE user on armv7a (asus tinkerboard SBC) and few amd64. Mate 1.18 have some issues after gtk+ upgrade. Some minor random issues with fonts, icons, shadows, backgrounds . Old ebuilds and eclasses is tarball from homesite,  not from github. Gentoo tree don't have ebuilds of Mate 1.20 release. Calculate have Mate 1.20. I'm experimenting, trying to fix ebuild fails in my local overlay. My English is not good enough to be maintainer of Mate DE.

[drobbins]

Anything helps. If you can put some good ebuilds in an overlay, with a README.rst, often we can take it from there.

[safulkin]

Here is Mate DE 1.20  https://github.com/safulkin/mate-120

Ebuild's versions updated according http://pub.mate-desktop.org/releases/1.20/

One ebuild edited (mate-base/mate-applets): invest-applet removed from Mate 1.20.

It works fine. No more glitches with fonts, icons, shadows and desktop backgrounds.

[shadow53]

Just finished doing preliminary updates of LXQt-related ebuilds in my personal overlay. Currently attempting to install them on my desktop. If everything seems to be working, I'll merge the changes into my kit-fixups fork and make a pull request.

[tux]

I'm willing to help testing/fixing on KDE. I made a staging repo for kde-kit/5.13-release manually synced with gentoo-staging here: https://gitlab.com/gtlt-funtoo.

I only fixed ebuild dev-qt/qtsql-5.11.1-r1 that blocked me upgrading from prime-5.12, rebuilding now (no other kde/qt blocker thus far) and testing.

 

If someone want to try it, add in your /etc/ego.conf

[global]

sync_base_url = https://gitlab.com/gtlt-funtoo/staging/{repo}

[kits] 
kde-kit = 5.13-release

(better to backup your meta-repo before sync)

# cd /var/git
# mv meta-repo meta-repo.official
# ego sync

 

[shadow53]

On 8/29/2018 at 5:39 PM, tux said:

I'm willing to help testing/fixing on KDE. I made a staging repo for kde-kit/5.13-release manually synced with gentoo-staging here: https://gitlab.com/gtlt-funtoo.

I only fixed ebuild dev-qt/qtsql-5.11.1-r1 that blocked me upgrading from prime-5.12, rebuilding now (no other kde/qt blocker thus far) and testing.

 

If someone want to try it, add in your /etc/ego.conf

...

Just tried adding this to my desktop. Got a warning that the branch 5.13-release has been deprecated, followed by Ego encountering a KeyError on the key '5.13-release'.

[tux]

I had hard times upgrading / regenerating all kits, it takes a long time. So I tried to only regenerate some of them by deprecating others, but that doesn't work this way.... It should be fine now (I will double check as a lambda user with https url later today at home).

Maybe you need to remove your meta repo first.

For info, I had difficulties with kwin/kwayland. Kwayland doesn't build in 5.49 on my system, only 5.43 5.46, unblocking kwin upgrade.

Also I was on xorg 1.20 kit and it was impossible, so better to be on xorg 1.19-prime first.

 

[tux]

I just checked from a fresh ego sync (/var/git/meta-repo deleted) and it works.

The big part is in upgrading process, I helped myself with gentoo Plasma upgrade (use / cleanup section). My changes in the repo are tiny :

• updated ebuild version dev-kit/1.2-prime/dev-libs/libdbusmenu-qt
• added ebuild media-kit/1.2-prime/media-libs/phonon
• added ebuild media-kit/1.2-prime/media-libs/phonon-vlc
• patched ebuild kde-kit/5.13-release/dev-qt/qtsql/qtsql-5.11.1-r1.ebuild replacing the SLOT ver_cut function (is it because of funtoo specific ??)
• deprecated gnome + python 3.7 to avoid merging them each time

--

Note: I will be on trip 2 weeks, I can lag at updating the repo if needed. Hope you can test 5.13 smoothly without breaking your desktop :)

--

For Kwayland I don't know from where to add protocol header, here is the issue :

-- Configuring done 
CMake Error in src/server/CMakeLists.txt:
 Cannot find source file:

   /var/tmp/portage/kde-frameworks/kwayland-5.49.0/work/kwayland-5.49.0_build/src/server/wayland-output-unstable-v1-client-protocol.h

 

[shadow53]

Ugh, I feel bad about this.

I've got school starting in about a week, so I'm forcing myself to switch to a "just works" distro (Solus) so I won't be distracted by tweaking packages and build options to my heart's content, like I have been all summer... I need my little free time for a social life and working on my software projects that I'm planning on monetizing once they're ready.

If someone wants to take over updating LXQt, I've got updated ebuilds in my personal overlay that can be used as a base. They have been updated to use the newer upstream URLs, include USE flags for just about every configuration option, and have been somewhat tested to build, install, and run. It also includes a new package not in the repo,  x11-misc/compton-conf.

The overlay contains other packages I've attempted to update/add, including some that don't build currently. The relevant packages for LXQt are:

dev-libs/libqtxdg
dev-util/lxqt-build-tools
lxqt-base/liblxqt
lxqt-base/libsysstat
lxqt-base/lxqt-about
lxqt-base/lxqt-admin
lxqt-base/lxqt-config
lxqt-base/lxqt-globalkeys
lxqt-base/lxqt-l10n
lxqt-base/lxqt-meta
lxqt-base/lxqt-notificationd
lxqt-base/lxqt-openssh-askpass
lxqt-base/lxqt-panel
lxqt-base/lxqt-policykit
lxqt-base/lxqt-panelmanagement
lxqt-base/lxqt-qtplugin
lxqt-base/lxqt-runner
lxqt-base/lxqt-session
lxqt-base/lxqt-sudo
media-gfx/lximage-qt
media-sound/pavucontrol-qt
x11-libs/libfm-qt
x11-libs/qtermwidget
x11-misc/compton-conf
x11-misc/obconf-qt
x11-misc/pcmanfm-qt
x11-misc/qps
x11-misc/screengrab
x11-terms/qterminal
x11-themes/lxqt-themes

I wasn't able to do extensive testing of all of the applications, but I was able to get them all installed and could log in to an LXQt session. QTerminal worked, as did switching themes from the lxqt-themes package. There shouldn't be too much work left for LXQt, at least, except further testing of the packages and I think some USE flags need to be documented.

Apologies for not seeing it through, especially since I'm the one who originally reported the packages being out of date. I really appreciate Funtoo and the customization it provides, as well as the tools it provides on top of Gentoo.

[hackbyte]

On 9/15/2018 at 1:23 AM, shadow53 said:

Ugh, I feel bad about this.

I've got school starting in about a week, so I'm forcing myself to switch to a "just works" distro (Solus) so I won't be distracted by tweaking packages and build options to my heart's content, like I have been all summer... I need my little free time for a social life and working on my software projects that I'm planning on monetizing once they're ready.

If someone wants to take over updating LXQt, I've got updated ebuilds in my personal overlay that can be used as a base. They have been updated to use the newer upstream URLs, include USE flags for just about every configuration option, and have been somewhat tested to build, install, and run. It also includes a new package not in the repo,  x11-misc/compton-conf.

The overlay contains other packages I've attempted to update/add, including some that don't build currently. The relevant packages for LXQt are:

dev-libs/libqtxdg
dev-util/lxqt-build-tools
lxqt-base/liblxqt
lxqt-base/libsysstat
lxqt-base/lxqt-about
lxqt-base/lxqt-admin
lxqt-base/lxqt-config
lxqt-base/lxqt-globalkeys
lxqt-base/lxqt-l10n
lxqt-base/lxqt-meta
lxqt-base/lxqt-notificationd
lxqt-base/lxqt-openssh-askpass
lxqt-base/lxqt-panel
lxqt-base/lxqt-policykit
lxqt-base/lxqt-panelmanagement
lxqt-base/lxqt-qtplugin
lxqt-base/lxqt-runner
lxqt-base/lxqt-session
lxqt-base/lxqt-sudo
media-gfx/lximage-qt
media-sound/pavucontrol-qt
x11-libs/libfm-qt
x11-libs/qtermwidget
x11-misc/compton-conf
x11-misc/obconf-qt
x11-misc/pcmanfm-qt
x11-misc/qps
x11-misc/screengrab
x11-terms/qterminal
x11-themes/lxqt-themes

I wasn't able to do extensive testing of all of the applications, but I was able to get them all installed and could log in to an LXQt session. QTerminal worked, as did switching themes from the lxqt-themes package. There shouldn't be too much work left for LXQt, at least, except further testing of the packages and I think some USE flags need to be documented.

Apologies for not seeing it through, especially since I'm the one who originally reported the packages being out of date. I really appreciate Funtoo and the customization it provides, as well as the tools it provides on top of Gentoo.

I'm happy to see that there is at least some base to start from.

I actually have a problem with pcmanfm-qt 0.13.0 not remembering that i always want to see all (including hidden) files and just got slapped over there that 0.13.0 is outdated (for today there is 0.14.1 already).

So i cannot promise anything at all but will right now go and find out how to get lxtq-base/* and x11-base/pcmanfm-qt up to the newer versions. Thanx for your work!

And don't feel bad, we all have some sort of real life. ?

Hacky

P.s.: Sorry for full-quote, i don't know how to cut it down properly right now.. ?

[safulkin]

On 8/26/2018 at 1:18 AM, safulkin said:

Here is Mate DE 1.20  https://github.com/safulkin/mate-120

Ebuild's versions updated according http://pub.mate-desktop.org/releases/1.20/

One ebuild edited (mate-base/mate-applets): invest-applet removed from Mate 1.20.

It works fine. No more glitches with fonts, icons, shadows and desktop backgrounds.

This overlay for funtoo 1.2 updated up to Mate 1.20.4
Good choice for arm boards, all my asus tinkerboards  with Mate DE 1.20 since august 2018.

Next version Mate 1.22 (release month ago) in different new overlay for funtoo 1.3 and funtoo 1.2  https://github.com/safulkin/mate-122
Work in progress. few issues. Declared new features not tested (wayland, elogind)

[hackbyte]

I actually found that gentoo upstream ebuilds actually provide LxQt 0.14.1 including pcmanfm-qt and qterminal and stuff.

Now, i actually need to find out how to/manage to get them together with my fresh built funtoo 1.3-kit.

(Well, at least, having a funtoo within funtoo is sorta fun.. chroot ftw. ;))

P.s.: The linked git repo from shadow53 seems to be down sadly. ?

Edited April 17, 2019 by hackbyte
P.s.: The linked git repo from shadow53 seems to be down sadly.