Saturday, February 9, 2013

Gentoo 10.0 to 13.0 profiles upgrade & server profiles going away

We've generated a new set of profiles for Gentoo installation. These are now called 13.0 instead of 10.0, e.g., "default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop" becomes "default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop".
Everyone should upgrade as soon as possible. This brings (nearly) no user-visible changes. Some new files have been added to the profile directories that make it possible for the developers to do more fine-grained use flag masking (see PMS-5 for the details), and this formally requires a new profile tree with EAPI=5 (and a recent portage version, but anything since sys-apps/portage-2.1.11.31 should work and anything since sys-apps/portage-2.1.11.50 should be perfect).
Since the 10.0 profiles will be deprecated immediately and removed in a year, emerge will suggest a replacement on every run. I strongly suggest you just follow that recommendation.
One additional change has been added to the package: the "server" profiles will be removed; they do not exist in the 13.0 tree anymore. If you have used a server profile so far, you should migrate to its parent, i.e. from "default/linux/amd64/10.0/server" to "default/linux/amd64/13.0". This may change the default value of some use-flags (the setting in "server" was USE="-perl -python snmp truetype xml"), so you may want to check the setting of these flags after switching profile, but otherwise nothing happens.

Friday, February 8, 2013

KDE 4.10.0 plasma-desktop crashes and qt frustrations

While on my machine KDE 4.10.0 runs perfectly fine, unfortunately a lot of Gentoo users see immediate crashes of plasma-desktop - which makes the graphical desktop environment completely unuseable. We know more or less what happened in the meantime, just not how to properly fix it...
The problem:
  • plasma-desktop uses a new code path in 4.10, which triggers a Qt bug leading to immediate SIGSEGV. 
  • The Qt bug only becomes fatal for some compiler options, and only on 64bit systems (amd64).
  • The Qt bug may be a fundamental architectural problem that needs proper thought.
The links:
The bugfixing situation:
  • Reverting the commit to plasma-workspace that introduced the problem makes the crash go away, but plasma-desktop starts hogging 100% CPU after a while. (This is done in plasma-workspace-4.10.0-r1 as a stopgap measure.) Kinda makes sense since the commit was there to fix a problem - now we hit the original problem.
  • The bug seems not to occur if Qt is compiled with CFLAGS="-Os". Cause unknown. 
  • David E. Narváez aka dmaggot wrote a patch for Qt that fixes this particular codepath but likely does not solve the global problem.
  • So far comments from Qt upstream indicate that this is in their opinion not the right way to fix the problem.
  • Our Gentoo Qt team understandably only wants to apply a patch if it has been accepted upstream.
Right now, the only option we (as Gentoo KDE team) have is wait for someone to pick up the phone. Either from KDE (to properly use the old codepath or provide some alternative), or from Qt (to fix the bug or apply a workaround)...

Sorry & stay tuned.