bumbler
June 18th, 2004, 20:00
The whole thing! I dove in head first. After seeing how easy makeworld, etc. was, I decided to begin updating my userland stuff and getting the sources. Boy, did I bite off a big chunk! The route was to update Gnome 2.x via the Gnome2-lite meta port. 30 hours of downloading via my slow dialup. That's because I got X and Mozilla sources, in part. It took only 8 hours to build, but required constant nursing. Then I did KDE-lite so as to have KDE 3.2.3. It took only 12 hours to download, but about 24 hours to build. Only one single glitch that required intervention.

Here's the question: what is it about the process of using portupgrade on those meta ports that would require constant futzing with Gnome, and almost none with KDE? My thinking is that it's not about portupgrade, but something in the way the meta-ports were assembled.

Bumbler
Kernel_Killer
June 18th, 2004, 21:31
That's the new GNOME for you. There is something about how it's built to make it run correctly, like needing the new gtk2 support in every package. That and various other packages being a dependency to every new GNOME package. As for KDE, this was the same issue when going from KDE 2.x to 3.x. I'm sure it will happen again when they make another with such major changes in the programming.
bumbler
June 19th, 2004, 08:56
I realize that desktop users are sometimes sharply divided on Gnome vs. KDE, and if you love one or the other, you'll never think it's a problem when there are troubles upgrading. Personally, I haven't liked Gnome since 1.4. It seems to have gotten more chaotic in its dependencies, and much harder to configure at a user level.

When I built IceWM against Gnome 2.6, it actually became slower than the new KDE. That blew my mind. Who would have dreamed IceWM could be made slow?

Anyway, at least one "clueless user" article is coming on 'makeworld' soon.

Bumbler
elmore
June 19th, 2004, 23:36
Anyway, at least one "clueless user" article is coming on 'makeworld' soon.
Bumbler
Looking forward to reading it. All of your past articles have been excellent and I'm happy we get the opportunity to have them posted here in our forums and get to make contructive comments on them as well.