portversion and distversion - why not?

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 5/1/06, Kirill Ponomarew <krion at voodoo.bawue.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 11:32:55PM +0400, Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> > Portlint says:
> > FATAL: Makefile: either PORTVERSION or DISTVERSION must be specified, not
> > both.
> >
> > Can somebody please explain why? It comes in handy
> > to be able to define illegal distversion instead of redefining
> > the whole distname. B.p.m was designed to handle two
> > different variables in the first place. Should we really
> > abstain from using this functionality?
>
> DISTVERSION is just conform conversion of PORTVERSION, I don't see a
> reason to specify both.

grrr

To quote bpm:
PORTVERSION   - Version of software.  Mandatory when no DISTVERSION is given.
DISTVERSION   - Vendor version of the distribution.

Now what's so hard to understand here? Portversion is nice
and legal, it tries to increase from version to version, it
follows a number of guidelines imposed by FreeBSD. Now
distversion - is something from vendor's imagination. It can
contain a multitude of not very nice characters, long strings,
bad syntax; it can stay the same across releases (e.g. when
subdir is changing), it can go back and forth...

Portversion is the version that users and the system see
Distversion is actually _just_ for the purpose of downloading
and building the software

Conversions between them (both directions are defined in
bpm) are only to ease our live, they do not happen if both
*versions are defined.

What's so fatal if we use both, huh?