The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:18 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #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.

(Log in to post comments)

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.