Re: KDE 3.0 -3.?

James Ferguson wrote:
> Hi,
> ive just got the gentoo 1.4 UT cd and im wondering about the best way to 
> upgrade my current 1.2 system.
> presently, i'm running a very plain 1.2 system with KDE 3.0, and the main 
> reason i got the 1.4 cd was to uipgrade kde to a more recent version

The version number of the CD doesn't really have any /significant/ 
relationship to which versions of packages you end up using or how to 
upgrade them. The main reason to use a 1.4 CD is that it is easier to 
build a gcc-3.x based system "out-of-box".

> so my question is, should i uninstall KDE 3.0 (or any other packages i want to 
> upgrade) before i install a new version or should I simply "emerge -u 
> package"?

Yup, that will work fine (don't forget to emerge rsync first). There's 
no need to uninstall anything prior, but you should run:

   emerge clean

afterwards, which will remove any stale files belonging to the older 
version, and remove the entry for the older version from the package 
database. Having said that, personally I would uninstall any KDE package 
except for arts, kdebase and kdelibs. Then:

   emerge arts
   emerge kdebase   (this will install kdelibs as a dependency)

Now fire it up and check everything is OK. If so, then continue to add 
other packages such as kdeadmin, kdeutils etc as desired, and don't 
forget to clean afterwards.

> 
> also am i correct in assuming i can just mount the cd to 
> /usr/portage/distfiles to emerge packages from the cd?

Um, I don't believe so - unless the CD is now being distributed with 
pre-compiled binary packages. Remember that "package" is really an 
incorrect term with Gentoo. The ebuild file in the Portage tree for a 
given piece of software tells Portage how to get the source, compile it 
and so on. Even with software that is distributed as binary only, the 
ebuild tells Portage what to do. So "emerge rsync" ensures the tree is 
up-to-date (i.e. the ebuilds reference the latest and greatest software 
as well as any decent patches). To make a package (in the RPM sense) you 
can use "emerge --buildpkg <packagename>", which creates .tbz2 binary 
packages under /usr/portage/packages/All. You can then use those with 
"emerge --usepkg <packagename>". See the man page for more info.

If you have a valid Portage tree on a CD (whether you intend to use 
packages or ebuilds/distfiles) then yes, that procedure should work, 
although I suspect that something like the following might be more sensible:

    export PORTDIR=/mnt/cdrom/myportagetree

--kerframil