On 09/22/2012 09:55 AM, Michał Górny wrote: > Hello, > > The current dependency syntax: > > [VERSION-OP] PACKAGE-NAME ["-" PACKAGE-VERSION] > > suffers a few problems:
I like the current one your proposal seems quite a problem for a large deal of usecases. > 1. It is not really human-friendly. > > People don't say things like: > > I need newer than monkey-1.2. > > They say instead: > > I need monkey, newer than version 1.2. "I need monkey-1.2 or newer" sounds natural to me. > 2. With long package names and versions, it becomes hard-to-read. > > Consider the following: > > >=dev-foo/bar-very-long-my-name-is-4-beta-17 > > Where does the version number start? And yes, this is a valid package > name to our rules. > 4. Adding, removing and changing versions is not friendly at all. > > Consider the following dep: > > >=dev-foo/bar-bas-bat-11.2.4_alpha > > Now, you want to bump the dep to 11.3. You need to find the version > number, and modify it. Depending on the configuration, ^w is going to > eat the whole package name or just a single component. Use a better editor. > Then, you want to remove the whole version. You need to first remove > the version number, making sure it doesn't eat a bit of package name > as well. Then, you have to go back to the beginning of the string, > and remove the operator. > PACKAGE-NAME [[*WSP] VERSION-OP [*WSP] PACKAGE-VERSION]] whitespace as separator for atoms looks a huge can of worms waiting to be opened. how you'd pass that to emerge? How you make a list of atoms? Please try not fix/break what is not broken. lu