svn commit: r385864 - head/security/vuxml

[Simon L. B. Nielsen]

On 11 May 2015 at 20:56, Xin Li <delphij at delphij.net> wrote:
> Well, what I have overlooked is that * means "infinitely small"
> (arguably, * is a poor symbol for that meaning, but it was in the
> documentations for quite some time), not "any" (as one would expect)
> in the ports' version numbering system.
>
> In our system:
>
> * < 0
> * < a1
> * < r1
>
> While, e.g.:
>
> a1 < 0
> a1 < r1
> r1 < 0
>
> I also attempted some alternatives, but they failed:
>
> 2.* < 2.a1
> 2 > 2.a1
> 2 = 2.0
>
> Basically, 0 have the same meaning of what we expect in normal
> numbering system, while we added additional concept like a, r (both <
> 0), and in order to catch these new concepts, we invented * and lived
> with that for a decade.
>
> I don't see a easy solution here, unfortunately: we can't simply
> remove the a, r concepts because some software vendors don't issue
> formal release for very long time, and we really need some symbols to
> represent <0 numbers.

I agree it can certainly be confusing, but fixing probably worse right
now... and yes, software developers use very interesting versioning
schemes...

Perhaps a workaround can be for future entries to suggest discourage
use of "*", unless really needed, to reduce confusion? I suspect a
number of the old entries could work with .0, but going back now and
finding out is a lot of not very useful work.

-- 
Simon L. B. Nielsen