Johnny C. Lam wrote:
> The former is less extensible, but requires no changes to the
> infrastructure itself.  The latter is definitely more expressive, but
> ultimate would involve modifying the infrastructure quite a bit, and
> would make pkgsrc a little slower when running depends phase.
> 
> I favor the former unless it turns out we need to do this for a lot of
> packages.
> 
I prefer the latter.  Annoyingly, programmers add significant features at
the M.n "minor" (n) revision, not just the "major" (M).  Generalize.

It's long been a pet peeve of mine about getting just the right
combination of builds, and this would help automate a lot!


> Along those lines, we could also add things like ggrep, gfind, gxargs,
> etc. for the GNU versions of those programs.
> 
That might be useful, but shouldn't that be some form of alternative, like
(made up) bgrep>=2.2 | ggrep >=2.1?  The required features often don't show
up in the same versions....

Or maybe that's an argument for your former proposal, where tools would
strictly be limited to specific versions....