[gentoo-dev] EAPI-1 (or >1, perhaps) Proposal: AND Dependencies

["John R. Graham" <n3440d@gmail.com>]

I occasionally run across a package version dependency issue that cannot
be elegantly solved by the current  dependency syntax.  Every time I've
come across this, it's boiled down to a range.  For example, package
some-cat/foo has the following versions in the tree
    some-cat/foo-4.0.0-r2
    some-cat/foo-4.1
    some-cat/foo-4.1.1
    some-cat/foo-4.1.2-r2
    some-cat/foo-4.2.1-r5
    some-cat/foo-4.3
    some-cat/foo-4.4

Now, package other-cat/bar has a runtime dependency on some-cat/foo but
it only works with the 4.1 and 4.2 slot.  The other-cat/bar ebuild was
originally composed before the some-cat/foo-4.3 package came out, so the
ebuild developer coded the runtime dependency as
    >=some-cat/foo-4.1

But, when some-cat/foo-4.3 came along, it got messy.  The only possible
solution today that I know of is
    ( || =some-cat/foo-4.1* =some-cat/foo-4.2* )
and this potentially grows over time as new versions stabilize.

What I'd really like to be able to code is a range with an AND operator,
something like this
    ( && >=some-cat/foo-4.0 <some-cat/foo-4.3 )

So, my question is, does this make sense?  Is something like this
planned for some EAPI>0?  Would it be appropriate for me (a non-dev) to
file a bug and link it to SpanKy's "EAPI-1 tracker" bug?


Thanks in advance.

- John
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