Iain Patterson wrote:
Jo, you suggest that supporting version-less packages would be a bad idea. As I said in the original post I am not a big FreeBSD user and I don't have enough understanding of the package system to refute that claim.Having said that I don't think it's unreasonable to want to install "whatever version of $PACKAGE is available" and if my DefaultPkgMgr is, say, RPM I can do exactly that. The cfengine reference manual on
I concur with this. I've a script that ties Yum to cfengine, and uses cfengine classes, to handle package installation. This lets me say "install firefox" or "install firefox-1.5.0.12-9.el5.centos" as I see fit. Most of the time, I don't care about the specific version at this level; I just want the package installed on a host. Since I run my own yum repositories, I handle most of the version management there, instead of in cfengine. Having to micro-manage package versions in two places is, IMO, error-prone and waste of time (I'm fine with doing it once).
The standard behavior for all package management systems I've seen that offer multiple versions of a package (yum/rpm, apt, portage), is to use the "most recent," unless otherwise requested. It looks as though FreeBSD (and possibly others) get around this problem/feature by creating many parallel packages. For example, from a FreeBSD 6.2 box I've got, /usr/ports/lang/ has no less than 11 discrete packages for gcc, ranging from the old "gcc28" and "gcc295" to "gcc42" and "gcc42-withgcjawt".
-- Jesse Becker NHGRI Linux support (Digicon Contractor)
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