On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 02:42:10AM +0000, Eamon Caddigan wrote: > Howdy, y'all. > > I rekkon it's time we reopen bug #4450. I thought I'd post it to > gentoo-dev because a) tcl/tk is important, and can break a lot of stuff > and b) I'm relatively inexperienced with writing ebuilds, and would > appreciate comments and suggestions. >
SLOTting packages, which provides identical interface and cannot seamlessly co-exist in system, is bad idea. You can have installed two packages using two SLOTs in one time. But if you update or install anything, current packages/ebuilds have no intelligence to guess, for which SLOT they should be compiled. It will compile for this SLOT, which has created actual instances of /gentoo/usr/lib/*Config.sh! Two tcl/tk versions are partially acceptable for binary-only distributions where different soname is reasonable protection. But for systems compiled from source, risks of version mismatch is very high. Tcl/tk extensions built randomly for tcl/tk 8.3 and 8.4 will not work well when they are combined. Summary: Tcl/tk slots is bad idea. It can change only if somebody will hack all dev-lang/tcl (and some extra) ebuilds to be able to create simultaneously packages for both tcl/tk 8.3 and 8.4 (if they support building for both versions). --- Tcl/tk situation is NOT similar to Apache 1/2 or GNOME 1/2, which has different interfaces and different library names. This situation is very similar to libc5 and glibc few years ago - yes, you can install both in one system. Yes, existing packages will continue to work. But oops - new packages using one library compiled for libc5 and one for glibc will most probably crash. There is a chance for simple SLOTting - using /opt/prefix for alternative tcl versions. In such case you have to install all extensions twice - once for main system, once for alternative. For more, see insight ebuild. -- Stanislav Brabec -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
