Repost from gentoo-portage-dev[1]:

Was just brought to my attention that the =* operator doesn't work as I
thought, as for example =foo-1.2* matches foo-1.20 as well as foo-1.2.3.
This wouldn't be a bug problem if it could be used as a general glob
operator like with =foo-1.2.*, but it's use is strictly limited to the
above version (can only be used when a version component separator may
appear), so atm there is no facility to reliably lock an atom at a
specific version component when you have to account for multi-digit
components.
Now the question is if we want this glob-style behavior or not. From
the code comments it seems to be intentional, but I'd suspect that many
people share my original assumption and expect it to only match full
version components (as that is the much more common use case). Doesn't
help that the atom description in ebuild(5) doesn't specify the
behavior for this case either, 

"*  means  match  any version of the package so long as the specified
base is matched"

can be read both ways.

Opinions?

Marius

[1]
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.portage.devel/2231/focus=2231

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