Re: concurrent installation of different pkg versions
Paul Wise dijo [Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 11:41:17AM +0800]:
> > a generalized approach is needed.
>
> Multiple versions of a package seems undesirable to me, for the same
> reasons as static libraries and embedded code copies are undesirable.
>
> Systems that do this already exist though:
>
> https://nixos.org/
> http://www.gobolinux.org/
I have long lamented that's the direction the Ruby community took with
Gems¹.
Gems support different versions installed on a system, as well as
depending on specific versions. It makes sense for a programmer
keeping track of different systems with changing APIs — Not having
coinstalability means they'd have to patch all of their systems every
time an API changes. Which happens on a daily basis in Ruby-land.
But supporting this as a whole is a mess. We try to make sure our
system is a coherent unit, and that security and reliabilty fixes are
applied to all or our packages (yes, that's the reason why I spent
most of my Debian time in the past two weeks dealing with a single
issue in Drupal7: Waiting for the right times to upload the fixes for
stable / unstable / testing / bpo70 / bpo60).
Were we to support coinstallable multiple versions, we would have a
much harder time supporting security.
For some cases (i.e. Daniel's suggestion of JQuery), the installed
base and the incompatibilities between versions mean it could very
well make sense. Right now, we *do* ship different JQuery versions,
because several of our packages are incompatible with the systemwide
one... But that's a bug, not a feature.
¹ http://www.rubygems.org
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