Questions regarding FreeBSD packages and dependancies

Milscvaer millueradfa at yahoo.com
Tue Sep 27 08:21:45 PDT 2005



When I upgrade a package, say Gaim, and if I would
also like all of its library dependancies to be
upgraded, if new versions of certian libraries, such
as Gtk are installed, will the old versions of Gtk
remain in place and older programs that had been using
the older version will continue to use the old
version? 

The way, currently, that I believe we avoid the
DLL-hell situation on FreeBSD, where a new program
would install a new version of a library, blowing up
older programs on the system that used an older
version of the same library, being
incompatable with the new version, is to append a
version number to every .so file in the lib
directories, and link all programs to a specific
version of a library, such as one program may use
mylib.so.1.0 while a new program might use
mylib.so.2.0. Thus if a new program needs a new
version of a library, it can be installed and use the
new version, but all older programs can continue to
use the old version. 

If I use portupgrade to upgrade all dependancies for a
package, will it leave the older versions of library
dependancies in place so older programs which used the
older version can continue to use it?

I tried to use pkg_add to install a new program from
stable, however, it complained about older versions of
gtk being installed and refused to continue. Why not
just leave the old versions of Gtk there so existing
programs may continue to use them, and have new
programs installed from stable use the new version?

Thank you for your response to these questions. They
are greatly appreciated.


		
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