version dependencies in MacPorts?

[Jack Howarth]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 09:12:40PM +0200, Rainer Müller wrote:
> On 2009-09-13 20:37 , Anders F Björklund wrote:
> >> ps I can imagine that this might in concept be solved by
> >> requiring the user to do a selfupdate instead, however you
> >> would still need a mechanism to stage the build order in
> >> a manner that required version/revision dependencies are
> >> satisfied in the correct order.
> > 
> > I believe that's the usual workaround, keep everything on
> > the edge and requiring selfupdate and related upgrades.
> 
> With 1.8.0 install will try to upgrade dependencies first before the
> requested port will be build. This can be seen as some sort of
> workaround, as we can never be sure if the installed version would
> satisfy the dependency if it is not the latest available version.
> 
> Rainer

Rainer,
   It certainly would be nice to have some sort of basic
version/revision tracker for at least the buiild process of
MacPort. In fink, the incrementation of package names (foobar,
foobar2,foobar3) is reserved for the case where the ABI and
major soversion number changes (such as openmotif3 for 2.2.4
and openmotif4 for 2.3.2). Implementing such version tracking
in the packaging building side would probably easier to
than at the installation side (when only binary packages are
present) but still provide the framework for adding that at
a later date.
          Jack