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

[MK-MacPorts at techno.ms]

On Oct 31, 2012, at 9:40 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> ?? why would anyone care? The whole point of epoch is to be able to deal with situations like this, I don't see why anyone would want to go to extra effort to avoid using it.
Well, I know that it was introduced for these cases.
I just meant that it would be best to not to have it since most ports actually have no necessity to make use of it, because their version numbers go up and up. If once introduced you'd have to increase version number AND epoch every time.
At least that was my understanding.