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The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributionsThe Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributionsPosted Nov 8, 2007 16:18 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions by iabervon Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions
> So there is a mechanism in place to avoid this problem You're absolutely right, there was a way to handle this specific case gracefully. Still, such a situation (soname change) is impossible in the first place in most "stable" distributions. I could use another example, e.g., once a udev update added a non-standard user to one of /etc/udev/rules.d/*, with a result that my ldap-pam based system hung for several minutes during the boot; etc. In short, when versions of _all_ packages change from time to time, a chance for a, let's say, surprise is obviously higher ;-) One should certainly have this in mind when opting for Gentoo.
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The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions Posted Nov 8, 2007 17:03 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] An soname change may be impossible in a particular release of a stable distribution, but there have been rather a lot of soname changes in "Debian stable" over the years. Of course, this only happens at a new release, but that tends to make release times especially tricky. This is particularly true because stable distribution upgrades are a rare enough event that the procedures are never sufficiently carefully tested to be a suitable operation to perform on a stable system. The Gentoo mechanism for the stable version is pretty much unique in that you can run a system forever without ever doing anything that's either beyond end-of-life or is outside of the normal update process, whereas other systems require an upgrade, outside of the normal process, eventually. Of course, the actual Gentoo "stable" distribution doesn't necessarily avoid causing occasional breakage, but that's an implementation issue rather than a design issue.
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