Ticket #14796 (pike): please commit

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 2, 2008, at 17:56, Rainer Müller wrote:

> Eric Hall wrote:
>
>> 	I've always thought this was an excellent idea, it neatly
>> solves conflicting version problems (libnet for example) and allows
>> a new version of $THIS_DEPENDENCY to be installed without breaking
>> $OTHER_SOFTWARE that's linked against  
>> $OLDER_VERSION_OF_THIS_DEPENDENCY,
>> and/or resulting in the massive rebuild fsck to bring everything back
>> to happyness when a dependency is upgraded.
>
> I think it is a horrible idea. It totally defeats the feature of  
> having multiple versions of a port but only one active version.
>
> If you start linking into the depot, also rewrite all calls to  
> binaries to the depot and all access to /opt/local/share and so on.  
> Otherwise it would totally become inconsistent. And I don't  
> understand why you want to look for such files inside the depot.  
> The depot stores multiple versions and you activate one and only  
> one of them - the others are inactive and not used at all.
>
> - If I deactivate a port, I *expect* depending ports to break.
>   Of course a port will no longer work if a dependency is not active.
> - If I upgrade a port, of course I might also have to rebuild  
> depending
>   ports, because the installed library changed.
> - If I uninstall an inactive port, I expect it to be *safe* because it
>   is not used.
>
> Please tell me what advantage you want to achieve with this?

I believe we are trying to find a way to allow multiple versions of a  
single port to be active and in use at the same time.

So far I haven't formed an opinion on whether we should do this, or  
whether the method described above is the best way to do it.