How to depend on a variant (or do I want subports)?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 31, 2012, at 15:23, Chris Jones wrote:

>> AIUI, the tilde affects version comparison in the dpkg world so that
>> 1.2.0~beta1 is considered older than 1.2.0. Our vercmp proc doesn't
>> support anything like that.
> 
> That's exactly what I would have thought/expected. That the beta1 release is considered older than the non-beta release. To me, 1.2.0-beta1 (or 1.2.0~beta1) is a beta release in the run up to a final 1.2.0 release, so therefore older.

Right. Since MacPorts doesn't assign any special meaning to the tilde, it doesn't know that. When we encounter this situation (a version number that vercmp thinks is newer but is actually older), we ask the port author to increase the epoch.