[gentoo-dev] Re: Dangerous features in portage

[Paul]

Jean-Michel Smith <jsmith@××××.com>, on Wed Oct 30, 2002 [01:11:10 PM] said:
>
> 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.

	Hi;

	I believe the SLOT ebuild variable is for just this
situation.  I personally have quite a few packages where old and
new libraries coexist, and 'emerge clean' leaves them alone.
	'emerge prune' will nuke all but the latest version
of a package, I believe. (and perhaps older stuff that was
unSLOTed.)
	So, I would consider it a bug if 'clean' nuked an old
version of a package that can coexist with newer versions via
a SLOT...

Paul
set@×××××.com