How to keep KDE at 3.5 in Sid installations.
Hi, this has probably been discussed hundreds of times before, and
everyone is tired of the arguments by now, but I thought I might be
able to contribute something, for people who want to use Sid, but stay
with KDE 3.5
My personal preference, is to run Debian Sid on my personal PCs, but
not KDE 4.2. I like having cutting-edge versions of most programs, but
not KDE 4.2 (unstable & crashy, and too many missing features that I
use daily in 3.5).
I researched pinning, but that looked like a real pain, for dozens of
packages (just pinning kdelibs5 doesn't work for me, aptitude still
goes mad).
My solution, for keeping my machine on the latest Sid, except for KDE,
which stays on testing (for the moment), is to run a command like
this:
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade $(cat dist_upgrade_vers.txt)
Where dist_upgrade_vers.txt contains lines like this:
akregator/testing
amor/testing
ark/testing
arts/testing
...
I generated that text file, by running and re-running 'aptitude
dist-upgrade', and then adding <packagename>/testing (for KDE-related
packages), until aptitude finally reported that it was going to
upgrade everything to Sid, except for KDE packages.
This is basically a very ad-hoc, manual version of pinning, but it
works better for me in the current situation.
This probably isn't an ideal solution (KDE 3.5 will probably
eventually start breaking due to newer libs and so on), but for the
moment it seems to be working correctly, and I will probably need to
keep tweaking the text file as needed (and maybe even downgrade my
entire system to Lenny at some point). But, hopefully it will work
until KDE 4 reaches a point where I'm happy to switch over (maybe by
4.5).
David.
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