Packagers: What should we recommend about KDE 2 -> 3 upgrades?
I would like to raise an issue for the Debian KDE package maintainers:
will someone who has been running woody KDE 2.2 run into troubles if
they upgrade to 3.x? And if so, what should we do about this?
I asked about this earlier, but want to raise it a bit more forcefully
now, because subsequent conversations have reinforced my belief that
the upgrade path will not work smoothly because of changes in the
interpretation of configuration files, especially ~/.kde, between the
two versions.
If that's the case, I think it would be a huge mistake to make it easy
for many users to run into this problem.
I note that at least one Debian KDE FAQ explicitly recommends
upgrading to 3 right over 2.2:
http://davidpashley.com/debian-kde/faq.html#id2801637 (I realize the
FAQ is a bit dated; I'm not sure if it's supposed to apply currently,
but clearly people may run into it). And even without a
recommendation, it's the "natural" thing to do.
My guess is the safest route would be to compile KDE 3 to use a
different directory, such as ~/.kde3. Possibly there could be some
conversion scripts available. Certainly there will then be "I lost my
settings" complaints otherwise (but see below: KDE may already do the
conversion).
Alternately, it might be possible to deal with this entirely at
install time, or via some script magic that affects each user on their
first start of the new package (again, maybe KDE does this already).
The least attractive alternative, still better than nothing, is a
warning in the appropriate packages, during installs, and somewhere in
a README.
I would be delighted to find such precautions are not necessary, but
I'm concerned that they are. The information available on KDE's site
seems to imply even major version upgrades should work, but notes that
there have been reports of problems. It also seems to imply that your
.kde tree is automatically migrated
(http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/install.html, esp 4.16 at
http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/install.html#id2910419 and 4.7 at
http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/install.html#id2909163).
However, note 4.17 says "Normally (i.e. when not upgrading between KDE
versions) it's quite safe to leave these files [a bunch of run-time
communication files in ~/.kde] intact, ..." So perhaps upgrading KDE
while running KDE is risky... well for other reasons too--you'll be
uninstalling the KDE that you are running!
P.S. Since I'm not a maintainer, and assume the maintainers read this
list, I'm posting to debian-kde rather than debian-qt-kde.
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