On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:27:05 +0100 Sebastian Luther <SebastianLuther@gmx.de> wrote: > Am 17.12.2010 16:25, schrieb Ciaran McCreesh: > > So would anyone be especially opposed to making "best leftmost" an > > explicit requirement, enforced by repoman where possible (at least > > for the >= / < case)? > > Why can't the PM handle >= / < cases itself? Because things are almost never as simple as 'just' >= / <. You can add in clever trickery to deal with very specific cases, but the second someone throws things off by adding in a use dependency or a third package, things get weird. Consider a variation on the original case: || ( <a-2 >=a-2[x] ) where the user has specified -x for a. What should happen then? What about || ( <a-2[x] b >=a-2 ) ? Should that be rewritten in the same way? What about || ( <a-2[x] ( >=a-2 b ) ) ? Should the package mangler be clever enough to figure that one out too? What if b isn't already installed there? Which is really the problem: clever heuristics get extremely complicated very quickly, and they're never enough. -- Ciaran McCreesh