Hi All,

Tonight, I started catching up on my near 15-day backlog of Gentoo
Linux-related mailing list postings, and started hitting lots of discussions
about extensions to the dependency system.  This motivated me to add the
long-anticipated "*"-style dependency to Portage, and create a new Portage
release, 1.6.12.  It is now on CVS.  Here are how the new "*" dependencies
work:

Let's say you'd like a package to use the most recent 1.x version of freetype.
You can now specify the following dependency:

=media-libs/freetype-1*

Or, if you want the latest 1.2.x version of gtk+, use:

=x11-libs/gtk+-1.2*

You should only use the new "*" deps with straight version numbers; i.e. no
_alpha, _beta, _pre, -rX, or trailing letters.  They only really make sense for
straight x.y.z integer version formats anyways.  We will continue to extend the
dependency syntax to keep up with the needs of developers.

I also added a new version of sys-apps/baselayout (1.6.5) to Portage.  This new
release contains important fixes to the /etc/init.d/checkroot and
/etc/init.d/netmount scripts, as well as a couple of other minor improvements.

Enjoy!

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@g.o>
Chief Architect/President			http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.