On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:10:02 -0700, Peter Gordon wrote:
> * has only limited support for uninstalling. The biggest problem
is
> that there's no reverse-dependency tracking, you can unmerge a library
> and it will not know there are still programs depending on it which
> will be broken by the unmerge. This can be particularly bad on
> upgrades: when you upgrade a library to an incompatible version (new
> soname), it will just do it even when there are
> still packages depending on the old version, breaking those packages.
> And no, rebuilding everything (i.e. emerge remerge world) isn't really
> an efficient solution to this problem.
>
>
Not necessarily; Portage has a tool called "revdep-rebuild" which takes
care of rebuilding any package which no longer has proper dynamic
library linkage.
If a portage type system can uninstall well, and I believe that to be the
case, that seals it for me. The advantages of a portage type system are
greater than those of a yum type system.
Sabayon may have screwed things up, but a system which compiles most
things from source in a portage type way, with a few exceptions which are
time intensive, would be easier to maintain and thus larger. Open
Office, the kernel, things like that could be prebuilt.
I mean this really as food for thought for you guys. FC6 and Fedora 7
greatly improved in terms of the ease of use of yum. However, there's a
FC6 yum repo and a Fedora 7 repo. Why? That seems like completely
unnecessary duplication which wouldn't occur in a build-from-source
package manager. As a user, I hesitate to upgrade because of the lag as
third party repos slowly catch up to Fedora versions.
Again, thank you for the lively discussion :)
-Thufir