[ On Sunday, January 16, 2005 at 09:28:46 (-0500), othyro@freeshell.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: anyone built perl-5.8.6nb1 successfully on NetBSD/alpha?
>
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 02:13:01PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > Hmmm..... yes, especially given the way pkgsrc manages, or rather fails
> > to manage, simultaneous intalls of different perl versions.  ;-)
>  
> There's always pkgviews ;) Guess I'm not as quick to criticize this
> system, given the vast improvements in the short time I've been poking
> around with it and believe it to be the best open pkg-mgmt system
> available.

[[ BTW, your mail composer doesn't wrap long lines, nor does it use the
appropriate MIME magic to hide unwrapped (flowed) paragraphs. ]]


Pkgviews explicitly does _not_ solve the problem of having multiple
versions of things that users need/want to use directly.

In fact pkgviews takes the entirely opposite view that only one version
of any given thing should ever be in the default "view" at any one time.
That is simply not acceptable in general, and especially not for things
that users might want to use directly at the same time, such as
compilers, interpreters, editors, etc.

All that pkgviews does is hide all the clashes that would normally come
from having a different packages depend on different versions of some
child package that is not already capable of having multiple versions
installed at the same time.  Meanwhile perl is very nearly capable of
having multiple versions of itself installed simultaneously without use
of pkgviews (with the only "conflicts" being those of helper programs
not directly related to the interpreter itself, and the manual pages
too, I suppose if want ot be picky about it).  In fact almost every
problem that pkgviews was apparently designed to work around is already
almost entirely non-existant in the first place.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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