Other distros (was RE: Waxing Philosophical)

[Buck Rekow]

Michal Jaegermann wrote:

>On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 11:58:35AM -0400, Donsbach, Jeff wrote:
>  
>
>>I've become a Gentoo fan myself.
>>    
>>
>....
>  
>
>>And since you keep your
>>system as up to date as YOU want, there really is no notion of
>>"releases" of the whole system; only individual packages.
>>    
>>
>
>It seems that Gentoo did not go yet through an earthquake of
>changing a major version of shared libraries (glibc in particular).
>Changes in a minor version do not count because they are, well,
>minor.
>
>The problem is that when you installed new libraries then whatever
>still needs old versions will not start.  Whatever was running
>before is still running as it is using images loaded into memory.
>OTOH if you replace some programs with versions which require
>new libraries before they are available they will barf on you
>as well.  This includes whatever you are using to update your
>system.  To synchronize that sounds like a very hard problem
>if solvable at all.
>
>You can resolve that "chicken-and-egg" trouble by
> - using for update operations only programs linked static
>   (easier said than done)
> - or keeping copies of old and new shared libraries under
>   different paths and playing games with loaders (sometimes
>   simpler in theory than in practice but it should work if
>   you have space)
> - or use some "external updater", running say from a ramdisk,
>   which is what most distributions is really doing in installers
>   through "release updates".
>
>The last option is often an overkill.  You could, for example, to do
>such "gradual replacement Gentoo style" through different Fedora
>releases so far (and this includes the current "rawhide" which is a test
>for an upcoming next one).  Explaining to the "general public" when this
>is doable and when not would be quite a bit harder. :-)
>
>Once you have a "bare-bones" system operational you can replace/update
>the rest at your leisure.
>
>   Michal
>
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>
>  
>
the only thing keeping me from compiling slackware for my alpha is the 
question of how i'd compile the installer.