[gentoo-dev] Version management in portage

[Alexander Gretencord]

Ok, suppose we have something like apache which takes some time to compile and 
where I might have made changes myself which are not included in the ebuild. 
I wanna upgrade to a new version but the service must not be interrupted. No 
problem so far, just compile, install and make the changes if neccessary and 
then restart apache gracefully. But if a problem arises here I'm busted. My 
service will be interrupted till I fix the problem (which maybe quite fast 
but could possibly take too long) The only other option would be to reinstall 
the old version. Even if if I had built a binary package I could still need 
to do my own changes again.

Couldn't portage have a simple version management have builtin which installs 
packages into their own directory instead of to /usr directly. Of course this 
would mean to put software packages into /opt if you want to be FHS 
compliant, as own directories for software in /usr is not allowed normally.

Btw. it says "Large software packages must not use a direct subdirectory under 
the /usr hierarchy". Does that mean /usr/kde ist not FHS compliant ?

This should of course only affect daemons not normal user programs. So portage 
would install apache in /opt/apache-1.3.23 and make a symlink from 
/opt/apache to that directory. If you merge apache-1.3.24 then, you'd get 
/opt/apache-1.3.24. The symlink will then link to that new directory. The old 
apache install stays there so when you get problems, you can just switch 
symlinks and everything works again. The old binaries could be deleted with 
another emerge run automatically after a certain time that the administrator 
can set.

Any opinios on this ? I think this would be great for the gentoo server 
distribution too.

Alex

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deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin