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No reverse dependenciesNo reverse dependenciesPosted Jun 10, 2004 19:00 UTC (Thu) by shredwheat (guest, #4188)Parent article: Gentoo Package Management with Portage I consider emerge's lack of reverse dependency handling a major problem. This makes it near impossible to safely remove or downgrade any package. For example, once you decide to start using the "~" testing versions of packages there is no going back. This makes using gentoo like a one way road. It's a very nice and polished one way road, but once it takes you somewhere you don't like, your only option is to keep pushing forward and hope you eventually get past it. I'm surprised an article about package management on Gentoo fails to mention this. But this entire article seems more of a fluff piece than an objective review. I was turned off after "Gentoo's package management is better than Debian's since people don't like the Debian installer." Yeah, ok, and Gentoo's installer is what?
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No reverse dependencies Posted Jun 13, 2004 9:07 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > I consider emerge's lack of reverse dependency handling [...]Not exactly. qpkg -I -q <package name> will give you this info (though not recursively). > For example, once you decide to start using the "~" testing versions of packages there is no going back. Why? I once switched from ~amd64 to amd64 and can't remember any major issue. Having said that, ask yourself what's the reason one chooses an unstable variant of a distribution. With Debian, many people opt for "testing" or "unstable" because the "stable" brunch is hopelessly outdated for about any purpose, using backports is not widely known (and is quite restricted in number of packages available), and mixing of stable + unstable is a real hell for any binary distro. Contrary to that, with Gentoo it's extremely easy to have such a mix. Further, difference between stable and unstable in Gentoo is an order of magnitude less than ~100% in any binary distro. As a result, it's pretty common to have only a few packages specially marked via /etc/gentoo/packages.*. These are things one uses in daily work and ultimately needs a specific or most-up-to-date version. If a newer version of such a package is broken, it's a matter of downgrading only this specific package. My personal experience with Debian/unstable vs Gentoo: the latter is more stable and has given me _much_ less pain with upgrading/downgrading/dependency resolving issues. And that's what counters, IMHO.
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