On 5/10/07, Dermot McCluskey <dermot.mccluskey at sun.com> wrote: > > I think ARC are not keen on seeing multiple versions of a particular pkg > installed, unless necessary.
The trouble is that it often is necessary for customers. Speaking personally, the tcl/tk case isn't going to hurt me much (I simply change all the scripts to use my tcl/tk in /usr/local which I know is going to be there) but there are likely to be more cases like this as we have more applications. I've already been burnt by libssl going awol. I think we have to come up with a better way of supporting multiple versions of freeware across 1 or more releases of Solaris/OpenSolaris. The thing that really hurts is tieing all the version changes of the applications to an OS upgrade. I really want to loosen the ties. It would be easier if the new version had new package names with the version in them. That would allow, for example, installing Tcl/Tk 8.4 on a Solaris 10 system without breaking it. And would allow 8.3 to be installed on a later OS version. > I would much rather start providing the un-versioned link from now > onwards, rather than continuing to ship /usr/bin/tclsh8.3, although that > still won't solve your problem. (But it was classified as External.) I think the un-versioned link is good, in that it allows scripts to continue to work when systems are upgraded and there's only one version. (This solves the script case; it's less useful when libraries are involved.) One comment on manpages: probably nothing we can really do about it, but it's always really irritated me that many tcl/tk manpages share names with common system functions. Such as if, exec, exit - there are quite a few. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
