[Trippynet]

IMO, with Nekoware it is best to install what you need, rather than going nuts and trying to install everything.

Packages in "current" have been approved by at least 3 people, ie the original approach was to bung a new package into "beta", three people say "Works fine for me!", so they'd bump it over to "current". Now this hardly counts as exhaustive testing. Furthermore as the SGI community declined, it became difficult to get even 3 people to test out a new package and give it their thumbs up, which is why there's so much stuff in "beta" at the moment. Some of it will work fine, some will not.

Lastly, as you point out, some packages were linked against specific versions of older libraries that have in turn been superceded. You can sometimes work around this by symlinking a newer version of a library to match the older version that a package is requesting, or older versions of dependencies will be in the "obsolete" folder if you are desperate. Sometimes it may not matter, ie XMMS moans about being unable to find a specific version of libcurl, but it still launches and runs fine for me.

Of course, when these packages were originally built the version of the library in "current" was the one that the package wanted, so nobody picked up on the problem. In all honesty as these issues emerged over time, Nekoware should have had a system for demoting packages into an "unstable" folder or something so that the package was known to have problems and someone could try and re-build that package properly, but this didn't happen.