[gentoo-user] How do slots work?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Gentoo.

How do slots work?  I mean I've had a look at some ebuilds and see things
like this:

SLOT=3

, but with no clues as to how this gets used.  Is there any handy
documentation about this?  I've had a look round the usual places, but
found nothing.

What I really want to do is to try out Gnome 3, to see if it's like what
people say it is, but without endangering my current Gnome 2.32.1.  If I
build Gnome 3, will its executable have a different name?

Thanks for the info!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] How do slots work?

[Albert W. Hopkins]

On Monday, August 29 at 08:51 (+), Alan Mackenzie said:

 What I really want to do is to try out Gnome 3, to see if it's like
 what
 people say it is, but without endangering my current Gnome 2.32.1.  If
 I
 build Gnome 3, will its executable have a different name?

It's not slotted, so that answers your first question.

Also, gnome is a *bunch* of executables and libraries, so it's not as
simple as renameing gnome-session to gnome-session3.

To answer the first, if you have two or more of the same package, say
foo, then slots tell portage that more than one version of foo may
be installed if they are in different slots.  For example, python-2.7.*
packages are in slot 2.7 and python-3.2* packages are in slot 3.2 so
python-2.7.2-r2 and python-3.2-r2 may be installed simultaneously.
However, ex., 2.7.1-r2 and 2.7.2-r2 may not (because they are in both
slot) 2.7.

Similarly gnome-2* and gnome-3* (from the gnome overlay) are both in
slot 2.0.

The reason why GNOME 3 is in slot 2.0 is that it cannot be installed
alongside GNOME 2, so no use in bumping the slot #.