Other distros (was RE: Waxing Philosophical)

[Michal Jaegermann]

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