Re: [gentoo-dev] Dependencies default to accept any slot value acceptable (:*), can we default to :0 instead?

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
>
> PMS just provides a mechanism, but doesn't prefer one SLOT value over
> another. Such a change would introduce policy into PMS which is not
> the right way to go.

Sure it does - it defaults to :* when :* was never specified. I don't
see how defaulting to :0= is a "policy" any more than :* is.

>
> If a dependency on a specific SLOT value is needed then it should be
> explicitly specified in the ebuild.

Honestly, I think this is kind of like saying that garbage collection
is useless because programmers should just correctly free anything
they create exactly once.

If maintainers were generally giving careful thought to slots in
dependencies then we wouldn't have packages that stick the slot in the
package name instead.  Sure, we can just ban packages like these and
force everybody to fix all the breakage that results (which in theory
should never have existed), but it seems better to me to try to make
the best default the default.

I guess we could just ban any non-explicit slot version dependency (ie
90% of our current dependency atoms are now invalid), but that doesn't
really seems a bit like programming in Ada.  :)

Rich