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

[Brian Dolbec]

On Sat, 2012-09-22 at 09:55 +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The current dependency syntax:
>
>   [VERSION-OP] PACKAGE-NAME ["-" PACKAGE-VERSION]
>
> suffers a few problems:
>
>
> 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.
>
[snip :/ ]

> 4. It follows the syntax used by bash (for conditionals), pkg-config
> -- it is more natural in the environment.
>

The BIG problem with that is bash has nothing to do with evaluating
dependencies.  All bash does is source the *DEPEND and pass the value to
the package manager which does all the processing.  And all 3 current
package managers are set up to parse those dep strings with a set syntax
and whitespace. None of the PM's dependency resolvers are written in
bash, two are python based, one C++. This proposal would throw a big
monkey wrench into parsing those strings.  Introducing lots of bugs,
both in the PM and the ebuilds.

And this after all the fuss about the unified DEPENDENCIES proposal,
which is a small syntax change for the current processing code, easily
incorporated into the PM's. AND has definite, measurable advantages. 

so, -1
-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o>