On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 08:29:42AM +0200, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> I looked briefly at the documentation and it seemed like a complicated
> solution to a simple problem. It is designed to handle packages which are
> not supposed to be installed together. But different versions of dynamic
> libraries are designed to be installed together, that's why they have
> version number embedded in filename, so they don't need to have each its
> own directory.

ELF libraries have a combination of version numbers - major, minor,
and some have what the docs term "teeny".  What is actually linked in
at run-time in the ELF case is the libwibble.so.1 symbolic link - i.e.
the major one.

So although there may be many shared libraries with different minor
numbers, they usually retain the same major number (in general, unless
there's been an ABI change).

How do you propose to provide many instances of a library with the
same major number in the same directory?

I'm disappointed that you think that package views are complicated. 
To me, they're simple, perhaps ugly, but very functional, and very
little extra overhead in terms of user intervention, space, speed, and
installation overhead, but I admit that my outlook isn't exactly
unbiased.

However, if you read the documentation, you'll see the other systems
that have been proposed, and you will be able to compare them to
package views.

Regards,
Alistair