[ On Monday, May 15, 2000 at 12:24:19 (-0500), Mocha wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: make update
>
> i'm faced with similar problems. the problem comes in when the package 
> system is unable to deal with the same package of different versions. for 
> me it's the apache distribution. it works fine by itself. but the other 
> packages like ap-php3 and ap-ssl just wouldn't work right. php3 compiles 
> and installs fine, but would core dump when you start apache. ap-ssl 
> refuses to build erroring on various libraries that it's looking for. i'm 
> running current as of before the cvs disk crash.
> 
> the solutions i see are:
>    1. have all the packages that depend on the same package be
>       updated at the same time. this solution requires a lot of work
>       from the package maintainers and collaboration with each other.
>    2. change the package system so it can deal with having different
>       versions of the same package.
>    3. go back to the old way and build all your package. this is what
>       i find myself doing a lot of the time, which defeats the whole
>       purpose of having a package system.

     4. in the case of interdependencies due to libraries provide an
        option so the user can choose to statically link and thus only
        depend on the library at build time, not at install (and run)
        time.

I too choose #3 because of the growing lack of a choice for #4 (except
where I personally hack the related packages to remove the troublesome
and pretty well pointless use of shared libraries).

Of course this might work too:

     5. separate library packages into "developer" and "runtime"
        packages and allow multiple "runtime" packages to be installed
        simultaneously (which will work OK because all the shared
        libraries will have unique names due to the version number
        encoded within).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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