Re: Plasma desktop unusable in stretch
On Thursday, 3 September 2015 09:20:02 UTC+1, Christian Hilberg wrote:
> Hi Brad,
>
> Am Mittwoch 02 September 2015, 16:16:10 schrieb Brad Rogers:
> > On Wed, 02 Sep 2015 10:21:47 -0400
> > Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net> wrote:
> >
> > Hello Gary,
> >
> > >Yesterday I rebooted my computer but when it came back up and I logged
> > >in, Plasma was no longer usable.
> >
> > Come on Gary, you've been on this ML long enough to know that KDE is
> > going through some *massive* changes ATM. The path from KDE4 to
> > KF5/Plasma is far from an easy one to tread. Not least because of the
> > change to GCC v5. KF5/Plasma is very, /very/ different from KDE4. It's
> > not a huge surprise, to me at any rate, that some packages don't (yet)
> > have their dependencies sorted out fully.
> >
> > If one finds, when doing an update, it's necessary to remove large
> > numbers of packages to get everything updated then one should pause and
> > consider; Do I really want to lose half of my software suite? Usually
> > the answer is "no". In that case, see what can be updated without
> > ripping the heart out of your system.
> >
> > Testing sometimes has breakage. Sometimes that breakage is big. You
> > just have to deal with it. If you can't....
> >
> > ....there's always stable.
>
> To me, that kind of breakage (due to the transitions KDE4->KF5 *and*
> GCC4->GCC5 at the same time) is what we're used to see in unstable.
> This is what unstable is for, imho.
>
> By letting these transitions happen simultaneously in unstable as well
> as testing, the ML became flooded with all-the-same-topic mails over
> and over, because many people are using testing who do so because they
> like to be more recent than stable while not daring enough to expedition
> into unstable land.
>
> I guess it might have been wiser to let the transitions happen in
> unstable, since the massive breakage you mention was to be expected,
> and have the smaller issues and oversights ironed out in testing.
> This scheme worked out quite well in the past.
>
> Kind regards,
> Christian
If we don't want breakage, we have to use stable. The primary purpose of testing is to develop the next release, not necessarily to produce a user-focused version of stable with newer packages. Last time I looked, warnings about this were liberally included in Debian documentation and wiki pages.
I have had my fair share of breakages using unstable, and trying to find my way out of them is usually quite educational. If I'm too busy at the time, I can always ssh my way to my data from another machine. Failing that, a live image.
anxiousmac
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