Felix Miata wrote:
That is in part because both cannot coexist on the same
installation.
OTOH, KDE3 can coexist and is still available. And in Fedora, TDE can also
coexist with v5.
That explanation is incomplete. No 2 major versions of KDE can coexist in
the same prefix. The reason OpenSUSE's KDE 3 is parallel-installable (with
KDE/Plasma 4 or Plasma 5) is that they used the /opt/kde3 prefix for it.
They stopped doing that with their KDE 4 packaging and now use the standard
/usr prefix instead. So they are now stuck in the same situation as we are.
It is possible to do packages that use a custom prefix, but it is not
allowed by the packaging guidelines (so those would only be acceptable in a
Copr) and it is also a nontrivial amount of work to get right.
The alternative would be to put up a Copr with KDE 4 packages that REPLACE
Plasma 5, but then you'd need to bump the Epoch of every single package and
also add Obsoletes to undo the package splits from the Plasma 5 packages.
That's also a nontrivial amount of work.
The third alternative would be to go and rename every conflicting binary or
library in downstream patches. For having done something like that for the
small subset of library files (mostly -devel package files) that conflicted
between kdelibs/kdebase 3 and 4 (this part is much better with kdelibs4 vs.
KF5, where upstream addressed such conflicts), I can tell this (doing this
for ALL KDE files) is probably by far the most work out of the three
options.
Kevin Kofler