duplicate ports

[Brian Bobowski]

Petre Bandac wrote:

>do I really need both the old version of an port and the new one ?
>  
>
The specifics of perl have been addressed, but it's worth noting that 
sometimes, you do. A good example is tk; it's perfectly possible to have 
multiple versions of it installed because they're installed to different 
paths and have different names in /usr/bin, and sometimes necessary, 
because programs that run under one version(say, requires wish8.3) might 
not work under a later version(wish8.4). If the program isn't 
specifically referring to a version, it might need to be told which 
version to use; and in this case, i.e. if a program starts with #! 
/usr/bin/wish, the versionless command will just advise you to use one 
with a version.

Generally, if an interpreter has two versions in the /same/ ports tree, 
there's a reason for it. You just might not have any software installed 
that requires the different versions. Software besides interpreters 
might have different versions in there for a different reason, and they 
might not get along, which you'll be told if you try to install 
both(either directly or as the result of installing something else).

-BB