Re: philosophy of design; request for instruction

Dear Paul.

Paul Vixie - 08.06.20, 18:13:23 CEST:
> if there's a way to get tip-of-branch modern-up-to-the-day KDE and KDE
> PIM on freebsd or devuan, i'd drop suse tumbleweed in a new york
> minute, due to systemd. opacity has to trend downward or we all die
> from the heat death of complexity. systemd reminds me of akonadi in
> some ways. i'd pay real money to avoid ever seeing either again, or
> failing that, to make their operations fully transparent and
> testable. a lot of us moved off of VAX/VMS due to its gradually
> increasing monolithic opaque complexity. history records that lesson
> but it can't be taught and so must be re-learned by every new
> generation.

Currently KDEPIM and Akonadi in Devuan are quite current as in Debian as 
well. Well their development, and probably meanwhile testing, versions 
that is.

I have Plasma 5.17.5, that is unfortunately still outdated, – as well as 
KDEPIM and Akonadi 20.04 running on both Debian with Runit and elogind – 
yes, that is, still or again, possible! – as well as on Devuan. And that 
on top of KDE Frameworks 5.70. For Debian it requires a little trickery, 
but Plasma running on elogind since more than half a year on Debian 
already. I just recently switched from sysvinit to Runit which has been 
very, very easy. I was surprised how easy it was.

However the packages be outdated for extended periods of time as the 
Debian/Kubuntu Qt/KDE team is understaffed.

You can use kdesrc-build to build your own local copy of them. I still 
have my environment script again that made my usual Plasma session pick 
up anything I compiled myself, but they made improvements on preparing 
your own environment recently.

https://kdesrc-build.kde.org/

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-utils/kdesrc-build/index.html

Thing is the regular guide is about setting it up in a way that your 
self-compiled thing and the packages Plasma session are completely 
separate. That is cool if you like to get Plasma in the most recent 
version as well, but as I just wanted to use KDEPIM and Akonadi, I set 
up my own little script. A similar script is documented somewhere. 
However the basic of which variables are needed are also documented in 
kdesrc-build documentation:

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-utils/kdesrc-build/appendix-profile.html#old-profile-setup

Beware however that sometimes KDEPIM and Akonadi may require newer KF5 
packages than what is available in Debian Sid at the moment. And there 
can be side effects of having (some) of KF5 things compiled yourself 
while having them also installed as packages. My experience was that is 
usually just worked.

I used this quite some time to build my own version of KDEPIM and 
Akonadi.

Other than that one could try to stuff KDE Neon Akonadi/PIM and Plasma 
packages into Devuan, *however* I never tested this, have no idea 
whether that works or runs into dependency issues and it is in no way 
officially supported. As KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu it is focused on 
Systemd and last I checked, with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, some alternative 
packages to switch to a different init system do not appear to be in 
Ubuntu – while they still are in Debian.

Another option would be to help out the Debian Qt/KDE packaging team! :) 
Their work also benefits Devuan.

Of course, you can also go FreeBSD or Gentoo way. Just giving you some 
additional ideas here.

Best,
-- 
Martin