At 08:00 AM 5/12/00 +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I like the package system.
>
>BUT upgrading packages always drives me grazy.  Yesterday, I wanted to install
>AbiWord.  Fine.  My libpng was too old, pkgsrc wanted to upgrade it.  Fine.
>libpng is used by KDE, xv, gimp, etc.  All of these were deinstalled.  Now
>KDE fails to build (missing Qt header file or some such) and I'm left with
>a system without ANY graphics package using libpng.

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.