kwin-style-dekorator not installable

[frisil]

Hi,
just trying out qiana 64 kde. Package kwin-style-dekorator will uninstall kde-window-manager and when I do that I have no windows decoration at all. But I want my old dekorator theme back, I put a lot of work into it. Any idea what to do?

Thanks for any help in advance!

[Zalbor]

I'd also like to install dekorator. Any idea why it can't be done?

[Zalbor]

I tried the following in a VM. So far it doesn't have any problems, but I've not used it much afterwards so I don't recommend doing it -do it at your own risk.

1. I installed the missing dependencies of kwin-style-decorator (in my system, it was just kde-window-manager-active)
2. I downloaded the dekorator package from the command line:

   Code: Select all

   sudo aptitude download kwin-style-dekorator

   (aptitude is needed because even if you tell apt-get to download only, it will complain about the conflict with kde-window-manager)
3. I installed the package with dpkg, telling it to install it no matter what:

   Code: Select all

   sudo dpkg --force-all -i kwin-style-dekorator_0.5.1-1ubuntu3_amd64.deb

   (the actual file name may be different if there's a new version of dekorator by the time you do this, or if you're in a 32-bit installation)

After that, dekorator seems to work just fine.

[Zalbor]

The above method caused kwin-window-manager to become "broken" and the Update Manager to want to remove dekorator with every update.

This time I tried a different approach: I learned that all dependences (and conflicts) are listed in /var/lib/dpkg/status, so (after I made a copy of the file) I edited it and removed the kwin-style-dekorator conflict from kwin-window-manager.
This allowed me to install dekorator normally, through synaptic (or apt-get etc) with no complaints.

This is on my real system, not a VM, but once more I'll warn anyone that I don't know if anything is truly broken yet. I'm taking a risk and seeing what happens.

Update 2014-09-22:
So far, the only "problems" I've noticed are barely an annoyance: In Synaptic, the kwin-window-manager package has a star on its icon, as if it's upgradeable. You can't update it in Synaptic though as the ability has been removed.
When making any changes through Synaptic, the package appears in the "Unchanged" list.
The Update Manager seems to be ignoring it, as it doesn't appear as upgradeable although it does in Synaptic. I don't know what will happen if an actual update is released for it though, or if it may be hiding updates that depend on it.

Update 2014-11-11:
An update was released for kde-window-manager and that required removing dekorator. I accepted it and simply edited the status file again afterwards, then re-installed dekorator.