Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic" Alpha4 and the Intel video drivers...

[Austin William Wright]

Craig White wrote:
> unfortunately it is not all around making your life easier but rather
> there are libraries which provide dependencies for many different
> packages and the incremental option will always hold back items because
> software X requires newer version of library Y and software Z can live
> with either but must be rebuilt to use library Y which is updated for
> software X
>
> It doesn't take long to figure this out when you start getting involved
> with packaging software.
>
> Craig
>   
That's because debian's package manager SUCKS and can't even install
multiple versions of a package at once. Apparently it only knows about
the latest package release, older packages are removed entirely.
Portage, what Gentoo uses (and some other distros too iirc), has it
right (except for the fact it is written in Python). It can compile from
source or install a binary, and install multiple versions of a package
if necessary to resolve a dependency (or maybe you just want to have
multiple web browsers for testing, you can do that too). You can specify
what features you want to install, why bother supporting apache if you
are never going to use it? You just specify the list of packages you
personally depend on (the special "world" package) and features (USE
flags), and it figures out everything it needs to do.

Austin Wright.