Announcing CFT for KDE SC 4.7.1 on FreeBSD

The moment has finally arrived. We’re ready to share our work on the latest KDE Software Compilation to all the brave testers who wish to give a hand. The ports should be quite stable, and if we receive good feedback, I hope to be able to commit it to /usr/ports before the release slush, and let FreeBSD (and PC-BSD) 9.0 ship with KDE SC 4.7.1!

As promised, we’re building packages to make things easier for you (only for amd64, I’m sorry), but they’re not ready yet. Come back in few days for an update. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know how to update using ports from our testing repository.

The story is always the same (you may want to take a snapshot of /usr/ports before doing this):
# svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51 /path/to/area51
# /path/to/area51/Tools/scripts/kdemerge -kmpq /usr/ports
This will also bring you updated Qt and PyQt.

If – and only if – you want to test also KDE PIM 4.7.1, run (at this exact point):
# /path/to/area51/Tools/scripts/kdemerge -m /usr/ports

Now you just need to read UPDATING-area51 and proceed with the update.

I’m not going to tell you about the new things you’re expected to find (it will be material for another post, at commit time), but I’ll invite you to pay attention to some points:

• UPDATING procedure is quite long, we’d like a confirmation that it works;
• we managed to strip 10-15 seconds from startup time, but issues might come out (quite unlikely);
• we made an attempt to enhance devices detection by Phonon, and we need it to be tested.