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From: Bill/Carolyn Pechter <pechter@shell.monmouth.com>
Message-Id: <199605301440.KAA09760@shell.monmouth.com>
Subject: Re: Request for feedback: REQUIRES_OS_VERSION feature.
To: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk (Paul Richards)
Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 10:40:08 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: ports@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199605301334.OAA00366@cadair.elsevier.co.uk> from "Paul Richards" at May 30, 96 02:34:14 pm
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In response to Paul Richards who said:
> 
> Hmmm, the basic idea of stamping ports is good but I can see a lot of
> problems with this implementation.
> 
> How can you mark a port as working with *many* OS versions rather than just
> the one. If you stamp something as requiring 2.2 then it will probably work
> with 2.3 and later but will never work with 2.1, which people may still have
> around for some time (as our releases get more stable and featureful people
> will tend to leave stable boxes alone). You'd have to change the string
> at each release to ensure it worked in -current and that would then break
> older releases.
> 

Perhaps the thought should be something like the versioning in AIX's
installp program.  You can tell it you require the following
product packages and the level required.  It includes the capability
of saying product level = number or product level must be  > number
or product level must be < number.

Right now I'm working on generating some products and I think this feature
is quite good.  Perhaps a package description should do something like
product a requires xpm.tgz > 2.3 and FreeBSD_base_os >2.0.

How's this look?


Bill