Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Conary

[Nathaniel McCallum]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 11:52 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> > The thing is that portage's binary packages are far from perfect when
> > compared for example with rpm's. The problem is caused by the fact that
> > two seemingly similar binary packages can be different to the extend that
> > one will work on your system and the other not. As gentoo is mainly a
> > source distribution the effort required to make binaries "better" is
> > probably too big. Even then all kinds of binary problems are unavoidable
> > and the main cause of releases in all binary distributions, even debian.
> > With source one can mix and match, with binary releases one must ensure
> > that all dependencies are completely compatible with the versions that
> > existed when the package was built.
>
> Some issues with binary releases are covered by a document that rac has on
> his dev page. It's not the official Gentoo policy, but it does make you
> think about it :)
>
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~rac/binaries.html

These problems (as rac mentions) can somewhat be overcome by freezing
the toolchain or (as rac doesn't really mention) freezing the whole
tree.  I know freezing the tree has been mentioned as an "enterprise"
type option (having a supported tree with backported security fixes),
though it would help with desktop binary compatibility as well.

Freezing the whole tree or at least the whole tool chain would provide
us a way to not have to deal with funky compile problems as well.  For
instance, a person could always leave the frozen tree, but it wouldn't
be supported.  We would thus only support the frozen tree.  You could
also make the binary package only available within the frozen tree. So
the user could do something like this: emerge --binary-only gnome, but
this would fail: RELEASE="unstable" emerge --binary-only gnome.  I think
that gets us over most of rac's objections, no?

Nathaniel


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