KDE Apps (Gear) version 26.04 has been released upstream. Unfortunately, there is an updated version requirement for a package (gpgme) that is causing that update to be blocked on Fedora 43.
KDE Gear 26.04 requires the gpg package to be updated to 2.0+. That much is done on Fedora 44 and higher, but not in Fedora 43, and does involve something called a “soname bump”, which Fedora has a policy against introducing.
We are working on some kind of solution to bring 26.04 into Fedora 43, but for now, that won’t be possible. I will update here when those plans change.
To give a bit more context: The gpgme 2.0.0 release happened quite recently (June 2025), and - being a new major version - it contains quite a few API changes compared to the 1.x release branch (see NEWS file).
It is expected that updates that contain backwards-incompatible breaking changes like this only happen in the Fedora development branch (“rawhide”) -and possibly in the still-in-development “branched” release - but not in stable releases, see our Updates Policy.
You might notice that KDE software is listed as being (partially) exempted from this policy - so this issue is a more or less unavoidable result of Fedora, KDE, and gpgme having different release cycles, and KDE being allowed to ship major versions to stable Fedora releases, whereas gpgme is not.
Well, just updating gpgme to the 2.x version would break things, yes. For one, that update would not even be installable, because it would cause dependency resolution conflicts with applications and system components that currently depend on version 1.x.
There are four ways this could go that I can see:
Adapt Gear stuff so it can be built with both gpgme v1 and v2.
Provide a gpgme v2 build as a parallel-installable, non-conflicting alternative version (not sure if this is technically possible).
Push gpgme v2 as an update to Fedora 43, and rebuild all applications that currently link against v1 (this might be possible, depending on whether applications build successfully with v2 - they might not).
Stop updating Gear in Fedora 43.
Option 1. would be the cleanest, and wouldn’t require paperwork to apply for an Updates Policy exception (that would basically be Option 3). I’m not even sure whether we would grant such an exception, since gpgme is a dependency of a number of core system components (flatpak, ostree, libreoffice, poppler, seahorse, etc. on Workstation alone).
Ideally, making Gear compatible with gpgme v1 and v2 is possible (or, perhaps, just revert the gpgme v2 patch?). To provide gpgme v2 in F43, you would also need to provide a gpgme v1 compat build (so that existing programs that are not part of fedora itself can continue to run with the existing soname library), but it is clearly not the ideal way forward. The other alternative might be to bundle gpgme v2 with Gear (but that might also be problematic), and bundling is also not ideal.
Well, bundling it is still an issue because in the end, some other package (Like stated by @decathorpe: Flatpak) still uses 1.x which is not co-installable, even if 2.0 is bundled.
Have there been any developments regarding this issue? Even a confirmation that there won’t be another way of getting KDE Gear 26.04 than upgrading to F44 would be nicer than not knowing one way or the other.
1- Update gpg to the new version on f43 (Not going to happen most likely, that is too much of a core package in the distro)
2- Try to hack the requirement back down to gpg 1.x: That would be absolute nightmare in trying to accomplish and would most likely affect stability/reliability. Not doing this either.