On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 9:53 PM, Manuel Rüger <mr...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Please don't add any more syntactic sugar to dependency strings. > People might become confused about stuff like this: > > =cat/foo-1.3.1_rc3_p20130829-r42+[!a=,!b?,c(+)]:3=
=cat/foo-xyz+ is only one of the forms (we can still consider ~> or something else) but anyway, if we don't use another operator, would * no longer match strings like a glob matcher? For example, `=cat/foo-5.2015*` would no longer match cat/foo-5.20150102. On the other hand if we still allow to match like glob but have a workaround by allowing expressions like `=cat/foo-5.10.*`, we would now have to use 4 lines in order to accurately specify the targets: `=cat/foo-5.10`, `=cat/foo-5.10.*`, `=cat/foo-5.10-*` and `=cat/foo-5.10_*`. So should we no allow [.-_]* so we can reduce them to two? (Come to think of it, the @ operator is already used by sets so we can't have @cat/foo-5.10. But we can have =cat/foo-5.10@. Or =cat/foo-5.10~. But the latter could be found ambiguous or misinforming since ~cat/pkg-5.10 is already thought to only target revisions.) > Is there any real need to express this in a single line except for > saving a single line? There are areas where only a single expression is applicable like on a CLI query, or on package.* rules where applying or disabling a flag or keyword on specific version and unapplying or enabling the same flag or keyword on excluded versions may not always be sensible. Having to use more than a single expression adds noise and complexity.