Merged into Portage

The split ebuilds for 3.4.0_beta1 are now in portage. Development will continue there, bugs should be reported through the Gentoo Bugzilla, and the tree in subversion here will not be updated.
This means the split 3.3.2 ebuilds are no longer maintained. We're sorry, but we don't have enough manpower to work on them as well; they were not supposed to be a permanent ventue to begin with, just an easy bridge to 3.4 split ebuilds.
There may be more information on the split ebuilds in portage here.
The rest of the page may be outdated.

What this is

Separate ebuilds for each of the KDE (and KOffice) apps. Instead of emerging big, monolithic packages like kdebase or kdepim, you can quickly emerge konqueror or kmail. This is very useful to get rid of unwanted programs, cut down on emerge time, or just run a few KDE apps from another WM.

Additionally, updates to individual apps can be tested, released and installed quicker. For example, out of ~320 packages, less than 100 were updated in the upgrade from 3.3.1 to 3.3.2.

Finally, splitting the apps allows some extra compile-time configuration flexibility.

Howto

You download a tarred overlay dir here and emerge whatever you want. There are foo-meta packages corresponding to the foo monolithic packages, and a global kde-meta package.

Or, you could checkout the subversion repository anonymously (instructions and web interface here) to get all the updates even sooner, although things might break sometimes.

And when they do break, please post on the project's mailing list.

Status

Release candidate. This means all the features are present, and there are very few or no known bugs (or rather, regressions as compared to the monolithic ebuilds). What is needed now is a lot of testing.

We've begun moving this into the official Portage tree. So far kdebindings has been introduced there. Update: it now appears we won't add any more split 3.3.x packages into portage, but the entire 3.4.0 release in portage will be using split ebuilds.

Known issues and TODOs:

• Some packages install a bunch of completely static (non-compiled, non-generated) files and should be replaced with simple packages that can be emerged a lot faster yet than the current ones. (These are -applnk packages, ...)
• Apparently some style's icons aren't being installed (???)
• Would be nice to make the xdeltas support using any arbitrary release as base. However, users would have to set the right USE flag manually, so most of them probably wouldn't actually use it.

Extra features

• xdeltas: this feature downloads the oldest source tarballs of a series (eg 3.3.0, 3.4.0) and then as many official upstream xdeltas as necessary (eg 3.3.0-3.3.1 + 3.3.1-3.3.2). If you're starting from 3.3.2 this means downloading a bit more than is necessary, but when upgrading it saves a lot of bandwidth. To enable set USE=kdexdeltas.
• confcache: not really related to this project, but for another speedup you can use the experimental (and known-somewhat-buggy, but not in a dangerous sort of way :-) confcache patch to portage. With both this and the above enabled, emerge kde-meta can probably compete for speed with old-fashioned emerge kde.
  Note that portage CVS HEAD now includes a different implementation of confcache, so my branch is officially deprecated.

Authors

Dan Armak and Simone Gotti.