Emmanuel Hainry wrote:
Being a simple maintainer, I would say that dependencies on specific version (à la debian "this software require thingy version > 2.2.17 but it is not going to be installed") would make me unable to manage seriously my ports.
Why? I just don't get this point.
The not too untractable point however would be to introduce some metaports (for example, musicpd can be provided by mpd or mpd-dev), and dependencies would be put to the metaport instead of one of the providing ports.
Okay, let's call it "metaport". But it is the same thing you are describing. A port which provides multiple versions of a software. Nevertheless, dependencies have to go in each version of a port. A development snapshot could have completely different dependencies than the current "stable" version. Rainer