Hi all. I've had a couple of instances of this problem land in my inbox just this morning so I figured I'd send a general mailout in the hope of reducing the problem.
Various unofficial package repositories have at various times used the incorrect epochs in their package versions. An epoch is the highest-level test in determine what's an upgrade and what's a downgrade; for instance, version 4:3.0.5a (with epoch 4:) is considered newer than version 3.1.0 (which doesn't have an epoch, i.e., has epoch 0:). Specifically, in some of the unofficial package repositories (including the 3.0.x debs on kde.org I believe), *all* of the KDE packages have been given epoch 4: although some are only supposed to have epoch 0: or 1:. Affected packages include all of the kdesdk, kdeedu, kdeartwork and kdeaddons packages (not sure what else). This means that your system will *not* smoothly upgrade to the 3.1 packages that will be uploaded to sid. In this case probably the easiest solution is to remove all of the affected packages and then reinstall them as you normally would in dselect or whatever package management tool you use. Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and put a 4: epoch on all of the packages that are going into sid. Though in general there have been so many unofficial repositories in so many places by so many people that we can't support smooth upgrades from all of them. But anyway. In the meantime, if you're finding that dselect won't upgrade from your unofficial 3.0.x or 3.1 version of ksomethingorother, please bear in mind that this might be the problem. Ben. :)
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