Using poudriere to test KDE 4.12

[Mike Clarke]

On Saturday 07 June 2014 10:21:34 Jamie Paul Griffin wrote:

> I've not used poudriere before so, if I do this once the software is
> built  into usable packages will I be able to install them to test
> them out? if it works out i'll stick with them; if not, will I be
> able to revert to the older set of packages if needed?

>From my experience of moving from 4.10 to 4.12 I would expect going back to be a major task.

It had been a few months since the last time I'd upgraded my ports and lots of dependencies also 
required upgrading. If you go back to KDE 4.10 then I wouldn't be surprised if it fails to work with 
the newer dependencies and if you revert  the dependencies then you may have compatibility 
problems with other newer ports.

If you want to keep your options open for reverting to your earlier version then I'd suggest you'll 
need to update all your ports but first carefully check which will be affected and make backup 
packages of all of them.

I found that rebuilding all the required ports was a very long job and I had to do a lot of work to 
recreate all my kmail accounts and manually import all my contacts from the 4.10 address book 
and I also had to import my data for korganizer from 4.10 (and massage it a bit). I'd suggest 
exporting all your contacts and korganizer data before starting the upgrade. I hadn't anticipated 
the need to export or backup any of these and this would have been much more hassle if I hadn't 
been able to switch between different zfs boot environments with beadm. 

Also KDE will make changes to various configurations in ~/.kde4, ~/.config and ~/.local which will 
be incompatible with earlier versions so back these all up as well. On the upside kmail runs much 
quicker now, it used to take ages to switch between mail folders with 4.10.

Despite all that, 4.12 is working fine except that I can't get the desktop search to work until I 
manage to get my head round the complexities of virtuoso and nepomuk.

-- 
Mike Clarke