On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 04:02:08PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Question: how many levels of symlinks-pointing-to-symlinks does it take to get to the right place? And having supplied this number of symlinks, how can a user choose to execute one version of java while someone else prefers the other? Or how do you run one application under one version and another with a different one?
The question you have asked is a _complicated_ one. Many businesses have come up with home grown solutions to this problem (in my place it's called DAM; Dynamic Application Management; default values are determined by individual/group/server/NIS). It works on Solaris, HPUX, AIX and Linux.
However, it's _definitely_ beyond the scope of an OS package management system such as yum and rpm.
Anyone who wants to run more than one version of a specific piece of software is a "power user" (whether they recognise it or not) and the standard pre-built RPMs found in the repositories are _not_ designed for them. Such a user should build their own versions or use a repository designed for multi-versioning.
You have to recognise the limited problem that the repositories were meant to solve. They're not meant to be the ultimate answer to everyone's problems; they're meant to be a simple collection of software then typical end user can make use of. repotags would help avoid conflicts between repositories.
They are _not_ meant to solve the multi-versioning issue.
Kludges such as "alternatives" is a true kludge requiring the rpm packages to support it (ie a build time issue) and is not a solution to handling multiple repos nor multiple versions as a generic solution.