Re: Different versions of a package in the same profile?

[Federico Beffa]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 02, 2014 at 06:22:28PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> There is also the question of conflicts with identical file names. They are
> already there now, but their probability should be higher with identical
> package names. Maybe we need to rethink the handling of conflicts also.

In the past I did use the packaging system called SEPP

http://oss.oetiker.ch/op-sepp/

It allow installing several versions of a program on a single system.
The way they use to avoid naming conflicts it to systematically add a
suffix to binary names, with the suffix corresponding to the version of
the package.  They even went one step further and they added a suffix
with the initials of the administrator who packaged the application.

Each program was available with several names. For program foo:
- foo
- foo-1.2.3
- foo-1.2.3-fb
Obviously if more foo versions were installed, only one would be
referred to by foo.  The others were available with versioned names.

As a user, the system did work very well.

To handle updating, specifying foo should update the version owning
the name foo.  To update another version one would give the versioned
name "foo-1.2.3".

Regards,
Fede