On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 12:24:15AM +1100, Glenn McGrath wrote: > "In addition Portage supports the concept of SLOTs. In the development of > Gentoo Linux its developers often found that we needed to have multiple > versions of certain packages (such as libraries) installed to satisfy the > demands of other packages. The traditional approach to solving this > problem has been to treat different versions of the same package as > different packages with slightly different names." > > In debian we do mangle package names a lot, sometimes appending library > version numbers to the name of the package, sometimes we append the > distribution name the package name, its a bit of a hack. > > "Instead of the developers learning to treat certain versions as separate > packages, the developers taught Portage how to handle and maintain several > versions of the same package though the use of SLOTs."
this makes perfect sense, and would be very nice to have in debian imho cu robert
