On Sun,  9 Sep 2012 13:12:43 -0700
Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Introduced originally via 8b54be6a, this is effectively a noop for
> gentoo ebuilds- nor is it providing any useful information to either
> the dev, or the PM, thus remove it.

The point of :* is to allow repoman to detect situations where a
package has a build and a run dep upon something that has multiple
slots, and to remind the developer that they either need to := it, or
to explicitly say that it's ok for slots to change.

Without :*, there's no way to tell the difference between "the
developer forgot, or slots were added in later", and "this really can
switch slots at runtime".

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh