portage vs yum

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> Peter Gordon <peter <at> thecodergeek.com> writes:
>> IIRC, whereas Yum and other binary-based systems such as APT track literal
>> libraries (e.g., "libfoo.so.42(ABI_TAG)"),
>
> That's how RPM does it (and yum and apt-rpm then compute dependencies 
> based on that information), yes.
>
> DPKG doesn't support that, so Debian's solution is to just call the package
> providing libfoo.so.42 libfoo42, so when libfoo.so.43 comes out, the packages
> will require libfoo43 and apt will know that libfoo42 is insufficient.

DPKG does support virtual provides/requires (which the soname dependencies 
essentially are) just fine, and .deb build can be told to extract 
automatic soname dependencies. The difference there is that the soname 
dependencies are resolved to package names at *build* time, not runtime 
like normally in rpm world. This means dramatically less junk for 
depsolver to handle, but it also means much, much stricter packaging 
policies must be used. Like the library package naming you mention, and 
that packages can't be split without rebuilding depending packages etc.

 	- Panu -