I was just looking at the ghc port a few days ago, mostly in an attempt to figure out why it a-splode! on my 10.5 PPC system, and I noticed a lot of this:

platform darwin 7 powerpc { ... }

platform darwin 8 powerpc { ... }

platform darwin 8 i386 { ... }

And so on.  It occurred to me that if "platform darwin 9 powerpc" (that's me) was going to duplicate a lot of the existing rules, maybe it would make more sense to introduce ranges and sets to the existing logic (I checked, and there's currently no support for it that a cursory glance indicated, anyway).

Then we could do stuff like this:

platform darwin [7-8] powerpc { ... }

platform darwin 9 {powerpc, i386} { .. }

And have far more concise portfiles.   We might also have a platform_isset procedure so that you could do:

platform darwin [7-9] {

if {[platform_isset darwin 8]} { .. do some special tiger-only magic .. }

... more darwin generic foo here ...

}

Thoughts?  If folks like the idea and nobody immediately jumps to do it, I might give the appropriate hacks a whack (eee!  managers coding!).

- Jordan