Normal service resumed...

[compilerbitch]

Sorry if my LJ looked a bit funny today. I did a gentoo 'emerge sync; emerge world' and managed to stuff apache somehow. It turned out to be some problem with mod_php -- when I unmerged and remerged it everything started working again.

The gentoo package concept works really well, but I think that sometimes it does get a bit crossed up, probably because its model of dependency doesn't quite match reality. It's close enough that most updates work fine, but something big (like going from KDE 3.15 to 3.20) can cause problems.

KDE 3.2 is nice, by the way, if you haven't tried it yet. Lots of the apps that were nearly there in the previous version (KMail and Kate are favourites of mine) now work rather well. KMail now highlights spelling errors in red -- nice!

Comments

[redcountess]

I have KDE 3.1 but David won't let me strongly advised me not to install 3.2, his attitude is "if it ain't broke don't fix it" :-)

Re:

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I still have the previous version available too, so I can drop back to it. 3.2 seems solid as a rock actually.

I found out recently why KDE 3 is so solid. There's someone in our research group (Nick) who wrote an amazing tool, valgrind, that can crunch its way through code and report lots of potential crashes. It uses some pretty hairy maths to achieve this -- seemingly, the KDE bunch adopted it a while back and managed to very quickly find and fix a large number of very obscure bugs.