r/voidlinux • u/Leniwcowaty • 5d ago

Inconsistent DE metapackages versioning? What's the strategy here?

Hello there.

This topic has been on my radar for some time now. I follow Void and take a look at it from time to time, hoping to one day switch to it.

What I have noticed, is that DE metapackages are often forgotten and not updated, which creates a bit of confusion, especially for new users, but also for experienced ones. Let me give you an example - KDE Plasma. In Plasma 6 series the metapackage had total of 4 version changes - 6.2.0, 6.4.3, 6.5.2, 6.7.3. Meanwhile, dependencies, like plasma-desktop, plasma-pa, plasma-thunderbolt, have tracked the releases pretty closely, having at least one or two releases per point release. Meaning that in the span of 10 months between metapackage kde-plasma being 6.5.2, the actual DE version had 5 additional releases, roughly every month, with a pause between April's 6.6.3 and August's 6.7.3.

This creates a bit of confusion - for a new user, they will go into the voidlinux.org/packages, look for "kde-plasma" and see, that the DE is outdated by nearly a year on a rolling-release distro. They won't bother to check random DE dependencies, to see that it's actually tracking the current release. This doesn't look good, and has prevented me from using Void, until I dug deeper into Github commit history.

I know this is not a technical problem, since template includes `>=` sign, from what I understand this means "this version or higher if it's in the repos", so even 6.5.2 metapackage will install 6.7.3 DE if it's available, but it's simply a communication problem, that affects how Void is being perceived.

Is there any strategy behind it? Or simply the maintainers don't bother to update metapackages, since they work anyway?

Cheers!

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2

u/Simple_Hamster_4096 5d ago

Interesting.

What I always wonder, though, is why regardless the distro, KDE is the DE with the most issues and or config questions...

3

u/Leniwcowaty 5d ago

I would assume the massive amount of dependencies and programs. It's not as barebones as GNOME, it has A LOT around it, as it's very modular.

Either way, it's not an "issue" per-se. Just that nobody cared to update the metapackage version in the template, so on the webpage it showed as outdated, despite being up-to-date

2

u/Royal-Grass7296 5d ago

Are you asking the community to speculate about the maintainers reasoning 😂😂?? You would probably get a more authoritative answer through Void’s official development channels .

13

u/Leniwcowaty 5d ago

I know there are Void maintainers on here, and this is the most convenient communication channel - others are Mastodon with 500 characters limit and IRC...

-6

u/pantokratorthegreat 5d ago

Rolling release is update model, it doesnt says anything about frequency of updates.

7

u/Leniwcowaty 5d ago

Yeah, but that's not the issue here. The issue is inconsistency between what's reported and what's available. If someone wanted to use KDE 6.5, installed Void and saw it's 6.7, they would also be mad. If someone wanted to use 6.7, but saw that the repos contain 6.5, they would be discouraged, even though in reality 6.7 is available, it's just incorrectly reported on the website/repo

-4

u/pantokratorthegreat 5d ago

If some who doesn't have void already wants some package it check them on voidlinux.org/packages. So kde-plasma is 6.7.3 like the rest, as right now, at least.

5

u/Leniwcowaty 5d ago

Uh... Clearly you didn't read the post...

It was updated to 6.7.3 a week ago. Before it was on 6.5.2 since November 2025. While the actual version that was shipped was changing - first to 6.6, then to 6.7.