slashpackage

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 04:41:07PM -0400, Paul Jarc wrote:
> I read the packaging page at
> <URL:http://www.dragonflybsd.org/Goals/packages.cgi>.  It looks like
> you might be interested in the slashpackage system:
> <URL:http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html>
> <URL:http://multivac.cwru.edu./spf/>
> 
> With slashpackage and SPF, it's possible to have multiple versions of
> a package installed simultaneously, and it's possible for each package
> to use a specific version of each of its dependencies.  This does not
> require any special tagging of binaries, or any kernel changes to make
> files visible or invisible.

Yes, that was one of the things I had in mind. There is the problem
of either having to modify a lot of application to look in various
directories (e.g. Gnome and KDE the worst examples), make excessiv
use of variant symlinks or loose a big part of the flexibility
by installing parts in a common location.

It is my believe that most applications in a system will be installed in
only _one_ version. The most important examples are development tools
and language environments e.g. interpreter. The situation is different
for libraries, where the availibility of multiple incompatible versions
will be the _normal_ situation. But for libraries (as well as the
Runtime Environment of most languages) there is already exists a support
for multiple versions.

One problem which is not solvable with any current package system
is confliction ELF library requirements. Consider a application linked
against libpng-1.0 which uses a library which is compiled against
libpng-1.2 or vice versa. There is no support for such a problem yet.

Joerg

> paul