I guess this is a plasma problem (or more correctly a problem involving plasma).

This worked for a long time, but now, all of a sudden, most attempts to create plasmoids on the KDE desktop are met with a "Could not create a python ScriptEngine for the foo widget" message.

I suspect that this could have something to do with the way that gentoo handles python now, but I have no idea about what the problem could be or how to track it down. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Try rebuilding PyQt4.

Google'ing implies it's an emerge issue with some packages or their dependencies not installed properly. Try re-emerging the PyQT4, Pykde4 and plasma-workspace packages and their dependencies.

"Try re-emerging the PyQT4, Pykde4 and plasma-workspace packages and their dependencies."

The distribution (gentoo) does not list either PyQt4 or pykde as dependencies of plasma-workspace.

Is there some place where it is documented that they are required (I will file a bug in that case)?

I will point out that I have been running kde 4 for as long as it has been out, and have never encountered this before. Is this a recent change?

my guess is that there was an update that didn't go quite right and thus your problem

My suggestion was to re-emerge (is that correct Gentoo speak) the 3 packages I listed and any dependencies they might have (you mis-interpreted my post) - as I don't do Gentoo the package names might be slightly different

google01103 wrote:my guess is that there was an update that didn't go quite right and thus your problem

My guess is that you misinterpreted my post.

google01103 wrote:My suggestion was to re-emerge (is that correct Gentoo speak) the 3 packages I listed and any dependencies they might have (you mis-interpreted my post) - as I don't do Gentoo the package names might be slightly different

PyQt4 and pykde are NOT INSTALLED because they are NOT DEPENDENCIES of plasma-workspace (according to gentoo).

This has always worked before (without PyQt4 and pykde, neither of which has ever been installed). If something has changed (and apparently it has), then I would like details of the change in order to relay that information to gentoo kde maintainers.

They are soft dependencies: however the Python ScriptEngine *requires* PyKDE4 installed in order to work.

There have been issues in the past between what Gentoo considers a "dependency" and what KDE considers a "dependency". These issues have often caused numerous subtle breakages such as this one.

I would suggest ignoring the dependency information offered by emerge, and installing PyQt4 and PyKDE4 anyway.