Re: [gentoo-dev] atom matching behavior

[Joshua Nichols <nichoj@gentoo.org>]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> 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.
>   
Many Java packages use =foo-1.2*, expecting to get like foo-1.2.1,
foo-1.2.3, etc. In these cases, it is actually intending to depend on a
particular slot, ie 1.2, but without slot dependencies, this is the next
best thing that can be done

--
Joshua Nichols
Gentoo/Java Project Lead
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