KDE Upgrade Help

[Kurt Granroth]

On Monday 25 June 2001 02:01 pm, AZ_Pete wrote:
> Ok, now given the answers in the orginal thread below, this has sparked a
> couple of other questions:
>
> 1) Is it possible to upgrade individual KDE apps, such as Konquerer or
> KMail, instead of having to install a whole new kde-base RPM package?  If
> this is possible, I'm assuming that it could only be done by compiling the
> source of any given K app, which would lead to the next question.

Well, none of the apps found in any of the main KDE packages are distributed 
outside of those packages.  So you can't actually *get* Konqueror or KMail 
outside of kdebase and kdenetwork.

That said, you can always download the package and only compile those apps 
that you want...

In general, upgrading any single app in KDE (and anywhere else in *nix) 
requires only that you satisfy the dependencies first.  For instance, KMail 
depends on the KDE libraries (in kdelibs), libkdenetwork (in kdenetwork) and 
mimelib (in kdesupport before and kdenetwork now).  As long as you have those 
libs installed and up to date, then compiling KMail should be no problem at 
all.

> 2) I've run into the following problem a few times and was curious if there
> is an easy was to resolve it.  On my RH 6.2 box all the applications are
> installed via RPM.  If I wanted a new version of an application, but was
> unable to get it in RPM format and had to compile it from source how does
> this affect the RPM installation of the old version of the application? 

Basically, it means that the RPM query commands will no longer work for that 
package.  You may also have "left over" files when you do uninstall things.

What I usually do is the following:

o If I *can* easily uninstall the RPM version, I do
o If I can't, then I compile from source *BUT* I install the software in a 
different place than the RPM version
o If I can't do that, then I just install it over the RPM version

For instance, I usually have an RPM version of the latest KDE stable release 
that gets installed in /opt/kde2 (on SuSE).  However, I compile the latest 
CVS version of KDE several times a week and that goes in /opt/kde2-alpha.  My 
PATH includes both bin dirs so if I don't have a particular CVS version of a 
KDE app compiled, it uses the latest stable one.

> One last note: I would like to thank Kurt and the whole KDE team for
> delivering a truly awesome window manager.

*cough* KDE is not a window manager *cough*

> With KDE 2.1 I will be able to move my wife's computer from Win98 to
> Linux/KDE and she will be able to do all her work.
> She has seen me work on my KDE desktop and likes the look and feel a lot.
> We both find the "fuzzy" setting on the clock especially amusing!!

Glad to hear :-)
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop