Package management in Gentoo Linux
Posted Jul 6, 2007 16:39 UTC (Fri) by
cventers (subscriber, #31465)
Parent article:
Package management in Gentoo Linux
What I think would be really neat is if these package managers had the
following:
1. Dynamic library tracking, because revdep-rebuild SUCKS! The package
manager knows what binaries it is installing into the live system, it
should be able to 'ldd' and remember from then on. The hope, of course,
is that the package manager would be smart enough to recompile any
packages dependent on the library.
2. Ebuild cache... periodically, Gentoo deletes ebuilds from the portage
tree. The problem is that you may have an old version of some package
that Gentoo no longer supports which depends on a library you want to
upgrade. If you still have the source, Gentoo should happily rebuild the
old (no longer supported) version of the software against the new
library.
The lack of this ability leads to occasional frustration when you have to
upgrade a library due to a security vulnerability, only to discover that
you now have to upgrade other packages just because Gentoo deleted the
ebuild for the version you were using.
3. Transactional upgrades. If you want to upgrade a slew of software,
merge all the files into a temporary holding directory and wait until all
packages and their dependencies have successfully compiled before
updating the live system. Having to chase down build failures in the
middle of an "emerge", when your system is currently in a broken state,
is irritating.
4. A better etc-update. The one that is included should be taken out back
and shot :P
Gentoo is great, but in some ways I feel like it is just the tallest
midget. I really wish I had the time to help on the code, because I feel
that these features would greatly enhance the OS. A guy can dream, can't
he?
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