On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 06:21:33AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Steve Langasek <vor...@debian.org> writes: > > On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 02:07:22PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> >> it would be a great advantage for Debian over the other distributions > >> to have the capacity to install multiple versions concurrently. > > No, no it wouldn't. > > This is how rpm handles library packages. It's a horror show. > All of our research computing systems run Red Hat (or CentOS) because > that's where the people who care about concurrent installation of > different versions have gone, since no one in the Debian and Ubuntu world > with influence seems to care about their problems. I'm not saying that this isn't a problem that should be addressed. I'm saying that trying to treat this as installation of multiple versions of the same package is a terrible design. We of course want Debian to meet the needs of all our (potential) users, but this shouldn't come at the expense of the integrity of our package system. We already support coinstallability of shared libraries and interpreters, /under different package names/, and this works reliably. It also requires a good deal of care to get right, to ensure that interfaces are properly versioned where they need to be. There's no reason that this can't be extended to other kinds of packages, but it's not something that will ever work sanely without some per-package attention; and even then, chances are that we're only going to provide security support for one version of the package in a given release. And if the users aren't going to get security support, why do they care about the software being provided via the distro? They can do a local install just as well, or use unofficial packages in a container, for the same result. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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