[pacman-dev] vercmp wildcards?

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 15:11, Nagy Gabor<ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>> 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.

well, it's not necessary to use '.*'
- it can be coded in a way that 1.2 includes 1.2.3 but not 1.23
(I'm not suggesting that it is better, just pointing an option).

> 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.

The difference is that with kernel it is known fact that all modules
require rebuilding with every major version change,
but you cannot safely assume that libjpeg ABI won't be broken
with a minor version (e.g. 7.0 -> 7.1).

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)