portage-2.2 preserve-libs FEATURES explained
Maybe I am not the right person to write about it. But I felt the necessity to write about it. So I will just write something about preserve-libs, leaving other FEATURES to more competent people. Portage-2.2 has already entered unstable tree. Many people has started using it. It has many new features, like preserve-libs, sets, license filter and so on. Please check README and RELEASE-NOTES for a complete list. I will only talk about preserve-libs. To understand why we need it, we have to know some background information. First of all, applications are not built from scratch. Any non trivial apps use lot of libraries. In GNU/Linux, most of them are shared libraries, i.e. .so files. You can use `ldd /usr/bin/mplayer` to check what shared libraries an app has been linked to, replace mplayer to whatever program you'd like to check. Shared libraries have versions. E.g. /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51, here 51 denotes its version. After upgrading, the version number may change. E.g. /usr/lib/...