On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:07:27 -0800 (PST)
Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...> wrote:

(Things got hectic for me after my original message was sent and I never got around to
replying to this.  Or filing those bugs.  Mea culpa. I'll do the bugs soon.)

> Welcome!
> 
> A couple of things that might help. The startkde script provided in 3.5.13 needs love and attention. I uploaded a revised script in bug report 675:
> 
> http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=675
> 
> You'll find a patch diff and a full script in the attachments. Please test! Please patch! 
>One note: Bear in mind there are many distros to support and the script needs to be flexible 
>for everybody. Don't arbitrarily rip snippets from the script but instead add error checking 
>and tests when to run a snippet in the script.

The startup script I eventually ended up using was created by combining parts of one of the
scripts you posted here with the Gentoo KDE 3.5.10 startup script (and adding a few extra
variable setters to fix the problems I ran into).  It is extensively stripped and probably not
suited for general use by other distros as-is, but I'll check the bug and see about posting a
diff for any useful bits.

> The code upon which TDE was born was not the vanilla code directly from the upstream KDE sources. 
>They were Debianized sources and yes, modified for Kubuntu too. Now that people using different 
>distros are involved a lot of that Debianization is being remedied. Everybody here will be grateful for any 
>help you provide.
> 
> Not all of the packages have been ported to cmake. Here are the ones I know that have been converted:
> 
> Core packages:
> tqtinterface
> arts
> kdelibs
> kdebase

Personally, I wouldn't consider aRts a core package--KDE 3.5.10 runs perfectly well without it, and I
expect Trinity will too, unless there have been extensive changes.  (I haven't set up sound inside my
testing VM yet, or I would know for certain.)

> Other:
> amarok
> dbus-1-tqt
> dbus-tqt
> kdeartwork
> kdegraphics
> kdenetwork
> kdepim
> kdevelop
> 
> Use autotools to build the other packages.

Part of the problem is that I am trying to package some of the peripheral, non-core parts of Trinity
for Gentoo.  I was hoping to make things easier for Serghei and the others involved in the Gentoo
packaging effort, which seems to have even less manpower available than the main Trinity project
and is moving forward very slowly.

The thing is, I cannot get Portage, Gentoo's package manager, to build the packages that still use autotools.  
(CMake-based packages are okay.)  I apparently need the configure.in and supporting files that are 
missing from the root level of the source tarballs for 3.5.13 so that Portage can regenerate the 
other configuration files.

Unfortunately, I suspect that Timothy Pearson is the only person who might be able to produce these files.
I'm hesitant to file a bug about this because the problem is 1. with autotools and 2. probably limited to
distros using ebuilds/Portage, of which there are only about three (Gentoo, Funtoo, and kinda-sorta
Sabayon).

Without the missing files, these packages are going to have to wait for the attention of someone who knows
more about Portage and autotools than I do, which might take a long time.  It would also be wasted time,
with the CMake port in process.  I'd like to see Gentoo able to offer a full set of Trinity packages before the 
latter hits v15, though.

> The wiki has basic instructions for building but needs somebody new (unfamiliar) to help improve those instructions.
> 
> Know too that not everybody uses all of the packages in the source tree. So that means some of those non main packages are not tested as well as core packages.

Given that I've been installing everything piecemeal according to what I could persuade Portage to handle,
I suspect I know this better than most (I basically had only kdebase, kdelibs, and tqtinterface installed
when I first started Trinity up).  I had intended to test the handful of non-core applications that I use
under KDE 3.5.10 (Filelight, K3B, the Tiblit widget style if I can get it to build, and some stuff from
kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, and kdeutils), but that was before I ran into the build problems with Portage.
 
It's nice to see the flaky compositing bugs I keep getting with KDE 3 gone, anyway. :)