On Wednesday 02 April 2008, Walter Dnes wrote: > > To fix: unmerge the existing openmotif, merge the new one > > But, but, but... isn't the whole point of "--update --world" to > *UPDATE* to the latest available version? Why is it that openmotif > requires *MANUALLY* deleting the old version, when 99% of > non-slottable apps and libs allow portage to delete the old version > and replace it with the new version? I'm obviously missing something > here.
In general that is the way it works. Neil posted to that effect a few hours ago. However, just because it usually works that way doesn't mean it always should or will work that way. There's this pesky thing called "real life" and the pesky "corner cases" that come with it. Sometimes a new version of a package simply cannot co-exist with an older version because of the way it's coded. Portage first builds a package and installs it to a sandbox environment to ensure that the package is buildable. Only when tis is established and proven, will it delete the old version and move the new one onto the live filesystem. If you have this co-exist problem with that package, you have to manually unmerge the older one, as portage will not take the risk of leaving you with an unusable package (that correctly is a decision that a human must take, it is TheUnixWay(tm) and TheOneTrueWayOfComputing(tm). The lesstif/openmotif mess is slightly different. Openmotif has an odd licensing scheme, so odd the Fedora (I think) has decided to not support it at all. The relevant Gentoo dev wants to set things up so that you have to have one or the other but not both. The sanest way to deal with this is to force the user to make a decision and implement it, and to not have to put up with whatever choice the dev happens to think is ideal. This could have been better documented. In fact, there should have been some documentation about it at all, but there isn't - just a mysterious blocker. I only know it because I read the new comments in $PORTDIR/profiles/packages.mask after every sync :-) And I see those comments are no longer there :-( It's just one of those things that we have to put up with occasionally in real life -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
