good questions. smxi will do whatever apt-get or aptitude does. What apt-get does is different from what aptitude does, so keep that in mind. apt-get will basically do what you tell it to do, aptitude may or may not do what you were hoping it would do, so watch carefully if you use aptitude.

However, please note that smxi will NOT skip the section to update kde 4 from 3 if certain conditions are met, but I can create a flag that will do this, but it's up to you to use it.

I assume pinning will work, as long as all the dependencies are also pinned, but of course, you will have to discover this on your own.

The one advantage with aptitude is that if it is confronted with a difficult situation, it will sometimes give you some options on what to do, but your selections on those options are sometimes retained by aptitude, in its efforts to be a bit clever, so even that is unpredictable.

You will be journeying on your own seas here, and will have to be very careful, and note very selectively what must be pinned and when.

Testing gives you maybe 10 more days or so, give or take, until you can expect kde4 libs to enter, and, more importantly, kde 3 packages to be removed. Many kde 3 packages were removed yesterday in Sid, I expect more today.
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anticapitalista, I suggest you create a vm testing install of Sid and raw Testing antix, and test the kde feature now for Sid, which will help prepare you and antix people for the future, which is very close. That should help you provide meaningful feedback as well.

Please also note the KDE 4 setup thread which has some tips of things you'll encounter that are annoying.

Speaking for myself, I'm very unimpressed by kde4, I find it a pointless mess that solves no problem I have, and removes features that I found desirable. Maybe by 4.5 this will be resolved, but for now I'm going to take a serious look at xfce 4.6, which might by now do enough to meet my needs.
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Rolly-AU, because you presented a clear and valid case where the forced running of kde 3 to 4 conversion lib is not a good idea, I've added a new option to override that.

-! 31 will skip the forced running of kde 3 to 4 section.

Also please note that you can set permanent prefs for smxi like this (say you have no prefs yet, this case you will create the prefs file and put the value you want in it:



If you have further questions, please read how to set smxi sticky options.

Once you set this, smxi will always set this skip kde 4 section to switch off. If you want it to run ever, you need to either delete that file, or comment out the value in the file like so:

Thanks for bringing up a good valid fringe case that would be a good idea to handle.

This option will also be visible if you use the full, including developer options, smxi -H, which lists all options, including ones not really intended for anything but dev purposes and advanced testing.
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Thanks h2.

This is what I have done so far (just to let you know)

I've been testing the smxi script on antiX for upgrading kde3.5 to kde4 and the new xorg 1.6. This is what I did (in virtualbox) to test smxi and my own antiX-upgrade script.

1. Installed antiX-M7.5
2. upgraded antiX-M7.5 to antiX-M8 via the antiX upgrader-script
3. Installed kde-light from the meta-installer package included in antiX
4. Started smxi and set to sid repos (no sidux), dist-upgrade using apt-get (not aptitude)
5. Chose kde3.5->kde4 option in smxi script to upgrade
6. apt-get dist-upgrade to install all new sid apps including new xorg 1.6
7. Let smxi do its magic
8. Login to kde via SLiM to a fully functional kde4 desktop
9. Reboot to a fully funcional kde4 desktop

So smxi will work on antiX to successfully convert an installed (kde is not installed by default on antiX) kde3.5 environment to kde4 and a correctly working xorg.

To do: Remove kde4 as it is not my cup of tea ;)
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koffice is installable, and the kde4 conversion lib now has more packages added that were just removed from sid to the kde reinstall blacklist, so that should drop the number of messages about failed package installs for people running this kde 3-4 update.

Hope this is largely working for you.

Oh, you might want to double check your kdm defaults startup settings, you can use the app sysv-rc-conf to do that, sidux default is runlevel 5, debian and I believe mepis/antix is 2-5, for debian/antix/mepis users, this shouldn't have changed, but it might have changed back to debian defaults for sidux users.

smxi misc tweaks advanced tweaks has an option to reset or change the default kdm startup runlevels, very easy to use.
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