Matthew Miller wrote: > On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 07:56:41PM +0200, hw wrote: >> Sure is: You get to manage your distribution yourself by picking the >> versions of packages you figure might work together, which you are >> supposed and required to do with Gentoo, especially when you run into >> yet another dependency conflict. Only --- I guess --- you don?t get >> the same level of control over the packages as you get with Gentoo >> because there aren?t any USE flags. > > No, this isn't it it all. Modules are sets of packages which the > distribution creators have selected to work together; you don't compose > modules as an end-user. Then maybe my understanding of packages and/or modules is wrong. What is considered a module? What if I replace, for example, apache N with apache N+2: Will that also replace the installed version of php with another one if the installed version doesn´t work with apache N+2? >> Are you sure that all the added complexity and implicitly giving up a >> stable platform by providing a mess of package versions is worth it? > > This is a false dichotomy. We will be providing a stable platform as > the Base Runtime module. What if apache N+2 doesn´t work with stdlibc++ N? Will the library and all that depends on it be replaced when I install apache N+2? Wouldn´t that change the platform? >> How are the plans about dealing with bug reports, say, for squid 2.7, >> for those who need that version for a feature which hasn?t been >> included in current versions yet? Just wait a bit until the >> distribution goes EOL? Is RH going to fix them once someone has >> bought their support? > > I can't speak to Red Hat plans or Red Hat fixes. In Fedora, we might > have, say, squid 3.5, squid 4.0, and squid 5 streams (stable, beta, and > devel) all maintained at the same time. That reminds me of Debian stable, testing and unstable. I guess you could say they are different platforms, and though you can install squid unstable from unstable on stable, you can not have squid stable from stable installed at the same time. IIUC, you want to make it so that you can have both (all) versions installed at the same time. Doesn´t that require some sort of multiplatform rather than a stable platform because different versions of something might require a different platform to run on? For example, I don´t understand how I was able to compile ffmpeg, which required at least gcc 4.9, with gcc 6 and have it working despite there was a major change concerning libraries. IIUC, changing gcc versions requires a lot of rebuilds because of that, i. e. basically a different platform. Centos 7 is still gcc 4.8, yet there don´t seem to be any incompatibilities. However, that may not work in all cases. So what is a platform, or what remains of it when all the software you´re using is of so recent versions that the platform itself should be more recent? Wouldn´t it make sense to also have different versions of the platform?