Recommendations for version numbers in port names

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Oct 1, 2014, at 1:10 PM, Lawrence Velázquez <larryv at macports.org> wrote:

> On Sep 16, 2014, at 5:22 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> The problem with dots in port names is that so far "port lint" has declared the dot an illegal character in a variant name. This has led the perl5 port for example to adopt variant names like perl5_16 which I've always found a little confusing. It has been nice that under the original naming scheme, one could assume that in many cases the variant name matches the name of the dependency that will be added. If you want to use the python27 port, you use a port's +python27 variant, etc.
>> 
>> Leaving the dot in would remove the ambiguity, as demonstrated by the Perl ports, and "port lint" may be overly cautious in its prohibition of the dot in variant names. Someone should do some tests. Make variants with dots, like "mysql5.1", and see if they work correctly. Can you install the port? Can you upgrade the port? Can you uninstall the port? What if other variants are also selected? If everything works fine we can relax this lint restriction.
> 
> A cursory glance at port.tcl suggests that periods are acceptable in variant names.
> 
> http://trac.macports.org/browser/tags/release_2_3_1/base/src/port/port.tcl#L287

I don't know that I understand these variant checks, they seem to not produce the same result in all cases:

http://trac.macports.org/browser/tags/release_2_3_2/base/src/port/port.tcl#L289
http://trac.macports.org/browser/tags/release_2_3_2/base/src/port/port.tcl#L1752
http://trac.macports.org/browser/tags/release_2_3_2/base/src/macports1.0/macports.tcl#L730
http://trac.macports.org/browser/tags/release_2_3_2/base/src/port1.0/portutil.tcl#L2289

Would a proc for testing variant name sanity be worth the effort?


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)

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