Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
* Robert Lemmen <robertle@semistable.com> [021122 12:24]:
> > "In addition Portage supports the concept of SLOTs. In the development of
> > Gentoo Linux its developers often found that we needed to have multiple
> > versions of certain packages (such as libraries) installed to satisfy the
> > demands of other packages. The traditional approach to solving this
> > problem has been to treat different versions of the same package as
> > different packages with slightly different names."
> >
> > In debian we do mangle package names a lot, sometimes appending library
> > version numbers to the name of the package, sometimes we append the
> > distribution name the package name, its a bit of a hack.
> >
> > "Instead of the developers learning to treat certain versions as separate
> > packages, the developers taught Portage how to handle and maintain several
> > versions of the same package though the use of SLOTs."
>
> this makes perfect sense, and would be very nice to have in debian imho
Could someone explain to me, how this can make sense at all?
Perhaps I define package wrong, by in my eyes it is an entity to be
installed with its version number to describe how new it is.
It doesn't make sense in my eyes to have the same thing installed two
times at once. (And major-versions of a library are not only a newer
one, but a different library, that only shares a name and perhaps
much of its code, so not the same thing).
It seem only to be spliting the name of a package in some basic part and
some "so"-part and the like.
Is there any advantage in this?
Reducing a package with a library file to be only the library is hard
simplification. It is compiled with specific options and placed on
specific paths, with specific compilers and against specific libraries.
Splitting some of these out from the name to a "slot" has in my eyes
only the disadvantage of addings unneeded complexity.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
--
<gEistiO> sagen wir mal...ich hab alle sourcen in /lost+found/waimea
<me> gEistiO: [...] Warum lost+found?
<gEistiO> wo haette ich es denn sonst hingeben solln?
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