On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Jeff Smelser wrote:

> This handles different versions and where each one is progressing, I just hope
> they start realizing they can't delete and ebuild just because they are 2-3
> versions past it or the like. I got caught on that with wget. I upgraded,
> later that week, I decided to do a emerge -e, and it broke because the wget
> version I had was gone..
>
> Never did figure out why they deleted the damn thing.

One thing I've noticed is that if you want rsync to delete "outdated" (no
longer on server) files, you must specifically pass it --delete options.
This is hard-coded into emerge right now, but could, of course, be easily
edited to never delete old ebuilds.  (Upgrades to portage will overwrite
this, of course.)

Presumably, the new portage will let this be an option, or create a list
of files to exclude from deletion consisting of all the currently
installed package, or something similar to that.  Admins can also easily
create ebuilds which only add a security patch, rather than getting an
entire new version.

One of the biggest differences I can think of between a source-based
distro (such as Gentoo) and a binary-package based one is that you rarely
have library dependency issues.  If you compile a newer package against an
older library, it will usually still work, and vice versa.  If a library
is upgraded, you don't need to upgrade the packages that depend on it,
just recompile if necessary.

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