Re: [gentoo-dev] A more natural (human-friendly) syntax for dependencies

[Luca Barbato]

On 09/22/2012 09:55 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The current dependency syntax:
>
>   [VERSION-OP] PACKAGE-NAME ["-" PACKAGE-VERSION]
>
> suffers a few problems:

I like the current one your proposal seems quite a problem for a large
deal of usecases.

> 1. It is not really human-friendly.
>
> People don't say things like:
>
>   I need newer than monkey-1.2.
>
> They say instead:
>
>   I need monkey, newer than version 1.2.

"I need monkey-1.2 or newer" sounds natural to me.

> 2. With long package names and versions, it becomes hard-to-read.
>
> Consider the following:
>
>   >=dev-foo/bar-very-long-my-name-is-4-beta-17
>
> Where does the version number start? And yes, this is a valid package
> name to our rules.


> 4. Adding, removing and changing versions is not friendly at all.
>
> Consider the following dep:
>
>   >=dev-foo/bar-bas-bat-11.2.4_alpha
>
> Now, you want to bump the dep to 11.3. You need to find the version
> number, and modify it. Depending on the configuration, ^w is going to
> eat the whole package name or just a single component.

Use a better editor.

> Then, you want to remove the whole version. You need to first remove
> the version number, making sure it doesn't eat a bit of package name
> as well. Then, you have to go back to the beginning of the string,
> and remove the operator.

>   PACKAGE-NAME [[*WSP] VERSION-OP [*WSP] PACKAGE-VERSION]]

whitespace as separator for atoms looks a huge can of worms waiting to
be opened. how you'd pass that to emerge? How you make a list of atoms?

Please try not fix/break what is not broken.

lu