Re: [gentoo-dev] Help offered - Portage tree

[Caleb Tennis]

> I think remi was more speaking about incorrect deps (say misplaced in
> RDEPEND) than problems concerning the package manager.
>
> In any case, openssl is the perfect example of what can go wrong because
> of upstream's behavior. The problem is that program A compiled against
> version X of openssl won't work with version Y>X. Currently we need to
> keep X's libs around and run revdep-rebuild to fix this.

Right, my example was mildly contrived.  But I've run into this same issue with
packages like ruby and glibc, where the build system had newer versions and you run
into symbol issues (or errors like "invalid binary format") because you need to
upgrade underlying libraries.

> Most librairies don't cause this problem though so I don't really see
> this as a bug on the gentoo side even if it's annoying.

It's not really Gentoo's fault, no, but it's a problem that could be somewhat fixed.

> Anyway, to keep machines using binary in sync without much headache, my
> current solution is to use a squashfsed portage tree with --deep. It
> works pretty well.

Agreed, but the problem is (at least in my case) we're talking about production
machines that are actively running, and the customer needs an upgrade of a package
but we don't want to take a chance at ruining something else by upgrading --deep if
we can help it.

From their perspective, they just want it to work (and don't care about what has to
be upgraded), but from a sysadmin perspective it's a difficult problem to solve over
time, especially when you have 10+ other sysadmins, who all may not know that when
you upgrade package X be sure to remember to also upgrade packages Y and Z at the
same time or you'll run into problems.

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