Please, excuse me! This is my first mail to any Gentoo list and I should be introducing myself as the perfect unknown I am but, instead of it, I feel as if, with the simple mindedness of the just arrived, were about to say aloud the emperor to be nude.
The matter is I cant but give my two cents and say: SLOT. Again, I ask for your forgiveness in case this has already been discussed here. I have tried, and not been able to find any trace of it. To make my point, let me say all I know about software engineering: There are small "maintenance" changes, mostly bug crunching and, perhaps, security incidences, that get by with a make number (the one after the second dot in the version code). Then, you can find functionality or packaging changes that deserve a new release number (the one to the right of the first dot), even when some companies prefer to call them "service packages". And, when something needs real revamping, then comes the version number, the one that comes before any dot in the version code. The first example to justify a version bump is breakage of backward compatibility, so... IMHO, this restructure means a new version. And it is for new versions that slots came to be. So that you can yet use and maintain the old version, while the new one stabilizes and begins to produce its rewards (It is not without perils that you reuse the name-space with something that is truly a different application, even if with a functionality akin the one before). This way, you could perfectly use the old slot to unmerge what it merged, and the very Portage should get rid of it when it were no more necessary. If, after a time, any package would depend on the new slot and were incompatible with the old one, that should only mean that, anybody to use it, had to renounce to the backward version at all. Then, you have to take your chances: it exists the possibility of beginning a new Portage tree free of packages that depend on the old version, just to be sure that there is a clean installation and migration path... and I think that only with the slot solution may you be sure of this without the wood. Well, to conclude, slots are a small headache and not even completely well supported by Portage, but I think now is the moment to consider using them and, if, because of it, you end with a better understanding and support for them, so the better. Quality is hard to begin with but, at last, it pays for itself. Thank you for your indulgence. Gustavo de Lama. -- [email protected] mailing list
