Re: [gentoo-pms] Bash features

[David Leverton <levertond@googlemail.com>]

On Saturday 09 January 2010 18:44:02 Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > Doesn't the way that's worded mean "it has to work with every single
> > 3.2 patch", though? I take that to mean "must be completely parsable
> > with bash-3.2_p0 through bash-3.2_p9999", not "must work with at
> > least one version of bash-3.2_psomething".
>
> Then we could simply have said "must be parsable with =bash-3.2" which
> we didn't. Clearly, the main idea was to disallow usage of bash-4*
> features.

That would completely defeat the purpose of specifying a version at all.

The most sensible interpretation would be to treat the bash version 
requirement in the same way as an ebuild dependency.  If an ebuild says 
>=app-shells/bash-3.2 (it should be >= here, not =*, because ebuilds need to 
work with bash 4 too, but the principle is the same), then it means the 
ebuild is expected to work with /any/ version that matches the dependency.  
The only difference is that we have a spec that defines the "dependency" 
which ebuilds are supposed to respect, as opposed to documenting the 
requirements of a package that someone already wrote.