On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:43:03AM -0600, Doug Leavitt wrote: > SUNWapch -> system/apache/server/13 > SUNWapch22 -> system/apache/server/22 > > [ vs. ] > > system/apache/[email protected] [or whatever] > system/apache/[email protected] [or whatever]
The reason is that one of the design centers of pkg(5) is that only one version of any particular package may be installed at a time, because they'd be expected to install in the same location, etc. Many packages are, in fact, set up like this (mercurial, zsh, et al). But some components need to be installable on the system multiple times. Apache is one. Python is another. Because these components will thus need to go into different directories, they need to be in different packages. Now, it's certainly possible that pkg(5) could handle multiple installed versions of a package. However, it'd still be up to the package developer to make sure that they were simultaneously installable -- there's nothing we can do to make sure multiple versions won't collide with each other. And there'd need to be some mechanism in place to say that a package *didn't* have this ability (hey, I tried to install three versions of system/core, and I didn't get what I wanted!). In fact, you end up with a complicated mess, lots of mechanism and annotation, and a fair amount of fragility. The best scenario looks a lot like Gentoo's slots. Which are functionally identical to just putting the version into the package name, so we decided to go with that. Danek _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
