Re: Asterisk package naming

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

What you're describing is the problem of having several branches of a package.

In OpenBSD, we finally solved that one 2 years ago, with branch specifications.

- packages record the directory they come from, and those directories are
generally organized in a sensible way (yeah, not always)

- pkg_add can take stem + branch specifications like so:

pkg_add python%3.6
(which will add any package from the python 3.6 branch, shunning the other
branches)

- pkg_info can output branch info without specific package version numbers, 
e.g., stuff like
python--%2.7
(packages not directly installed, but installed only as dependencies, can
also be ignored)


Both mechanisms combined make it fairly easy to extract relevant information
for further processing...

Not saying you guys should do the same, but other the years, we found out
the hard way   that the best solution to getting relevant semantic information
out of the packages/ports was to keep it around, and make darn sure the core
tools do process it.  Once it's "lost", reconstituting that info with
ad-hoc scripts is awkward, full of special cases, and incredibly brittle...