Especially if you happen to be on the z platform and running a major commercial distribution, such as it sounds like in Mr. Boyes's case, I tend to agree with you Pieter. It is true hat open source package APIs can become moving targets on th whim of the respective project lead, but Redhat and SuSE aren't known for rushing out experimental code into their production distributions. Usually you have this problem when you're runnin debian stable where mny packages are two years behind the current release (or at least traditionally have been.) But again Pieter I agree with you, getting a modern package manager to play nice is easy. It's getting the packages to play nice which is challenging. And it may VERY well require some assistance on the part of your vendor.
Erik Johnson On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Harder, Pieter <pieter.har...@brabantwater.nl> wrote: >>Depending upon what distro you are using, your package manager may allow >>you to have both the old and the new version of the package installed at >>the same time. If the package is a set of libraries with suffixes, then >>that might be sufficient. With RPM-based distros, you tell RPM to install >>the new package, rather than upgrade the package (rpm -i ... instead of >>rpm -U ... or yum upgrade ...). With a DEB-based distro, I don't know how >>you do that. > > Well, the problem is usually not in getting two versions installed. The fun > results from the fact that both versions are there at the same time, and > getting separation between them. You definitely don't want applications to > mix components of both with unpredictable results. > > So to get back to the original question. If and when vendors do support > running on some distro level you certainly do expect them to support running > with package versions current for that level. So I would expect a vendor to: > > a. only support running on a backlevel distro (say SLES 8) with packages > current for that distro, or > b. support running on a current distro (say SLES 10 ) with current packages. > > A vendor requiring you to mix packages from a. with b. is certainly in error > in my view. > > Best regards, > Pieter Harder > > pieter.har...@brabantwater.nl > tel +31-73-6837133 / +31-6-47272537 > > > Brabant Water N.V. > Postbus 1068 > 5200 BC 's-Hertogenbosch > http://www.brabantwater.nl > Handelsregister: 16005077 > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
