We solved this by installing to /usr/share/<pkg>-<slot> where slot is
roughly the ABI (we increase it every time a new version breaks
something using the library).
Very nice. So you actually allow a package to be installed in various
version numbers in parallel? How do you handle man pages and all sorts
of stuff like that (e.g. executable in /usr/bin has version number in
command?)
manfred
It's not mandatory to install man pages on Gentoo but of course helpful
for users. The thing is that besides the JDK itself I haven't see Java
applications shipping man pages so far (reasons are easy to guess). As
for the executable versioning, yes we version the executables if it's
useful to install multiple versions at the same time. Most of the time
it's only prudent to keep the executable in the latest version and
libraries for the old versions. For example if the different versions
use the same subdirectory in /home then it would be dangerous to let the
user mix versions like that but in the case of for example Netbeans it's
safe as the settings directory is versioned so there is for example:
/usr/bin/netbeans-5.5