On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Julien Letessier wrote:

> I'm writing a dselect-like tool for NetBSD binary package repositories,

Sounds interesting and useful. (For those who don't know: dselect is a
Debian tool for installing, removing and getting information about
Debian's packages. I found it difficult to use at first; and once I used
Debian's apt-get I never went back.)

> and was wondering if there is an 'official' reference / code blob about:
>    * how package version strings are to be compared;
>    * how requirement strings are to be expanded in a boolean expression.

Maybe have a look at
/usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install/lib/ftpio.c
/usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install/lib/file.c
/usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install/add/perform.c
and other related files for "wildcard" and expandURL, etc.

You may want to use that library.

For perl or other examples, look at code from pkgsrc/pkgtools/ packages.

Also, please consider making your code so it is easy to develop with new
user interfaces (console and/or x11).

Good luck!

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/