From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 18779 invoked by uid 1002); 21 Nov 2003 13:44:43 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 22997 invoked from network); 21 Nov 2003 13:44:42 -0000 Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 14:44:41 +0100 From: Stanislav Brabec To: Eamon Caddigan Cc: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Message-ID: <20031121134441.GA31194@mail.ignum.cz> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Slotting Tcl/Tk X-Archives-Salt: 8e102425-61e9-48a6-a5f1-4b10d7ccda0d X-Archives-Hash: dbc9d3a0cab037b02922f8ac51570625 On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 02:42:10AM +0000, Eamon Caddigan wrote: > Howdy, y'all. > > I rekkon it's time we reopen bug #4450. I thought I'd post it to > gentoo-dev because a) tcl/tk is important, and can break a lot of stuff > and b) I'm relatively inexperienced with writing ebuilds, and would > appreciate comments and suggestions. > SLOTting packages, which provides identical interface and cannot seamlessly co-exist in system, is bad idea. You can have installed two packages using two SLOTs in one time. But if you update or install anything, current packages/ebuilds have no intelligence to guess, for which SLOT they should be compiled. It will compile for this SLOT, which has created actual instances of /gentoo/usr/lib/*Config.sh! Two tcl/tk versions are partially acceptable for binary-only distributions where different soname is reasonable protection. But for systems compiled from source, risks of version mismatch is very high. Tcl/tk extensions built randomly for tcl/tk 8.3 and 8.4 will not work well when they are combined. Summary: Tcl/tk slots is bad idea. It can change only if somebody will hack all dev-lang/tcl (and some extra) ebuilds to be able to create simultaneously packages for both tcl/tk 8.3 and 8.4 (if they support building for both versions). --- Tcl/tk situation is NOT similar to Apache 1/2 or GNOME 1/2, which has different interfaces and different library names. This situation is very similar to libc5 and glibc few years ago - yes, you can install both in one system. Yes, existing packages will continue to work. But oops - new packages using one library compiled for libc5 and one for glibc will most probably crash. There is a chance for simple SLOTting - using /opt/prefix for alternative tcl versions. In such case you have to install all extensions twice - once for main system, once for alternative. For more, see insight ebuild. -- Stanislav Brabec -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list