Re: [gentoo-dev] Dangerous features in portage

[Jonathan Hunt]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 8:11 am, Jean-Michel Smith wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 October 2002 07:23 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> > The problem is downgrading. If you have had installed say libfoo-1.1. Now
> > the developers find out that libfoo-1.1 is seriously broken. As a
> > consequence, libfoo-1.1 is masked, and libfoo-1.0 is the newest. If you
> > now do an emerge -u libfoo the old version is installed. But if
> > libfoo-1.0 allready was installed it doesn't get installed. The
> > installation of libfoo-1.0 is not complete though, because libfoo-1.1
> > overwrites many of its files. Now with an emerge clean libfoo-1.1 is
> > removed, as a consequence libfoo-1.0 is crippled and libfoo-1.1 is
> > removed. An emerge clean after the upgrade to libfoo-1.1 would have
> > stopped this. This is so the reason that emerge now performs an
> > autoclean.
>
> What about situations where you want to keep multiple versions of a shared
> library (that is, after all, one of the nice features of UNIX over, say,
> Windows)?  For example, you may have software that is compiled against an
> older, incompatible version of imlib (or worse, 3rd party binaries you
> can't recompile).
>
> emerge clean nukes the old installation, and while the system is now no
> longer crufty it is also incompatible with that application.  I've seen
> this kino (before the new version came out) and dvlib, for example, and I'm
> sure there are other situations as well.
>
> Jean.

Isn't that what slots are for?

-- 
Jonathan Hunt (The Real Jonathan Hunt) <jhuntnz@×××××××××××××××××.net>
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"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
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