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Re: Plasma desktop unusable in stretch



On 03/09/15 04:52 AM, anxiousmac@gmail.com wrote:
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

Good discussion above. Like many I've been using "testing" as my personal desktop while using "stable" for everything else. That way I get to stumble across problems regularly without jeopardizing the more critical things and without needing to devote specific time to bug searches.

I've tended to view "testing" as a rolling release, with packages that aren't as stable or secure as the ones in "stable" but which are at least generally working as well as the developers (not packagers) intend. I understood that "testing" wasn't as bulletproof as "stable" and that I should expect some things to not quite work, for crashes to occur, etc. and I was prepared to put up with that. Generally I have found "testing" to be almost as good as the stable versions of other distros.

I also used to think of the "testing" package maintainers as the guardians at the gate, keeping dramatically buggy software from hitting the mirrors. I'm disappointed to learn that I was wrong.


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