On Tuesday 30 June 2009 23:17:02 Massimiliano Ziccardi wrote: > >It's far preferable to let people like yourself suffer the consequences of > > not > > >reading documentation > > Touched :-) > > However, I read the documentation. > It's just that this is my first gentoo installation: I didn't get I had to > uninstall the older version of the software to upgrade to the new one.
You get to learn those tricks as you go along. Normally, one just upgrades and portage takes care of the "install old one, install new one" step. But KDE split and monolithic ebuilds covering the same KDE package are different in this regard - they are incompatible and cannot co-exist on the same machine. > Especially when it says 'We still provide monolithic ebuilds for 3.5 (up > till 3.5.9) and they are ***cleanly interoperable*** with the split ones.' That's a strange statement for the document to make. Split and monolithic can interoperate as long as you keep them cleanly separated. Take an example - kdepim and kdegames. Both have full monolithic and split ebuilds. You might decide you do indeed want all of kdepim [1] but not all the games. So you could emerge kdepim and selectively pick the few split-ebuild games you do want. What you can't do is also try to emerge kmail - that clashes with the kmail that kdepim wants to put there. [1] Here you would actually use kdepim-meta in the real world (it pulls in all the kdepim split ebuilds), but this is a demonstration, not a list of accurate install instructions. > > However, I think now I understand how it works a little bit more (but not > too much ;-) ). > > One more thing: couldn't those 'stable users' read the documentation too, > and unmask the obsolete package (if they were masked)? Think about this. You are asking users who have been doing something one way for years, to all of a sudden have their packages masked, their systems broken, expect them to go and find documentation (the location of which is not easy to provide at that time), unmask stuff and continue. Why? And for what benefit? The way it is done is the best possible way for all the users. Existing users continue as they did, new users get to make a choice first (which is something they have to do anyway). > > Massimiliano -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
