> Without this ability to manage the evolution of > shared components, > it becomes extremely difficult to reuse them, because > asynchronous > development almost guarantees that a change to the > shared component > will break a consumer, and that multiple consumers > rarely depend on > the same version.
I don't think its as common as you say. ABI changes from e.g. gtk+-1.x to gtk+-2.x are by nature different beasts. But within gtk+-2.x, once you are a stable version you will pretty much work with later versions till gtk folks decide to break the ABI. multiple consumers can depend on different stable versions but as long as the latest stable version is present all SHOULD work (otherwise its a bug against gtk+). gentoo provides layers of protection against such incompatibilities. One, packages are marked as masked, unstable and stable depending upon how much they are tested in general and tested for packages which depend on them and users have the option to go with unstable version or stick with the stable version. second, packages which break ABI are installed in their own 'slot' and for some of those pkgs, you have the option to switch between slots. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
