[pacman-dev] vercmp wildcards?

[Nagy Gabor]

> Just checking the sanity of an idea here:
> 
> What do you all think of supporting wildcards for version comparisons?
> I was thinking fnmatch could almost be dropped in directly to
> alpm_pkg_vercmp in place of the initial strcmp.
> 
> Use case:
> readline version 6.0.003
> bash depends readline=6.0.*
> 
> Thoughts?

All distros (and package managers) I know doesn't use version wildcards.
This is not an argument, I just remark this.

In fact, I don't see why that would be problematic. That can be more
"comfortable" in many cases, see kernel>=2.6.29 & kernel<2.6.30
dependencies. These "double" dependencies should be used with most of
the packages (libjpeg.so.7 and so on), and wildcards would be easier
here.

Staying with kernel example, there it would not help too much (regexp or
something more sophisticated stuff is needed here): If you require
2.6.29.*, then you exclude 2.6.29; if you require 2.6.29*, then you also
include 2.6.295 (this is not real life example, but with kernel 2.6.2 it
is).

Conclusion: I don't know. The packagers should be careful, not the
package manager. ;-)

Bye