[arch-dev-public] Dropping kdebase-workspace

Antonio Rojas arojas at archlinux.org
Tue Dec 8 23:07:01 UTC 2015


TL;DR: kdebase-workspace is dead and should be dropped from the repos

The KDE4 Plasma desktop has been in maintenance mode for a few years and is 
EOL since last August (the git repo has been locked, so not even security 
fixes are allowed). We've been trying to support it alongside Plasma 5 for 
as long as possible, but this requires some packaging efforts, lots of 
duplicated KDE4 versions of libraries (also unmaintained) and is starting to 
cause some issues (FS#46730). Plasma 5 has been around for over a year, 5.5 
has just been released and should be stable enough to replace KDE4.

Therefore, I would like to drop the following packages from our repos:
 kdebase-workspace
 kdeartwork
 kde-wallpapers
 kdebase-plasma
 kdeplasma4-addons
 bluedevil4
 kscreen4
 kdeplasma-applets-plasma-nm
 kcm-touchpad

There are a few other packages which currently depend on kdebase-workspace:
 ktorrent - can be compiled without linking to kworkspace (will lose the  	
	shutdown plugin)
 knemo - there is a working frameworks branch, we should switch to it
 digikam - will lose the theme chooser (not a big loss)
 openbox - simply calls startkde, so the dependency just needs to be changed 
	to plasma-workspace
 qtcurve - the configuration UI has been ported to KF5 over a year ago, but 	
	there is no release yet - we should package a git snapshot, the 	
	current version is too old anyway

I don't plan to automatically upgrade to Plasma 5; this would be difficult 
technically due to the split packages and also the configuration is not 
migrated, so it's better to let users upgrade manually. Note that this 
affects the KDE4 desktop only: KDE4 applications (kde-runtime) are still 
supported and will be for the foreseeable future.

Any objections?


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