> I think remi was more speaking about incorrect deps (say misplaced in > RDEPEND) than problems concerning the package manager. > > In any case, openssl is the perfect example of what can go wrong because > of upstream's behavior. The problem is that program A compiled against > version X of openssl won't work with version Y>X. Currently we need to > keep X's libs around and run revdep-rebuild to fix this.
Right, my example was mildly contrived. But I've run into this same issue with packages like ruby and glibc, where the build system had newer versions and you run into symbol issues (or errors like "invalid binary format") because you need to upgrade underlying libraries. > Most librairies don't cause this problem though so I don't really see > this as a bug on the gentoo side even if it's annoying. It's not really Gentoo's fault, no, but it's a problem that could be somewhat fixed. > Anyway, to keep machines using binary in sync without much headache, my > current solution is to use a squashfsed portage tree with --deep. It > works pretty well. Agreed, but the problem is (at least in my case) we're talking about production machines that are actively running, and the customer needs an upgrade of a package but we don't want to take a chance at ruining something else by upgrading --deep if we can help it. >From their perspective, they just want it to work (and don't care about what >has to be upgraded), but from a sysadmin perspective it's a difficult problem to solve over time, especially when you have 10+ other sysadmins, who all may not know that when you upgrade package X be sure to remember to also upgrade packages Y and Z at the same time or you'll run into problems. -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
