portversion and distversion - why not?

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 5/2/06, Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> wrote:
> "Andrew Pantyukhin" <infofarmer at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > 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?
>
> Adding confusion. However, in situations where I had itched to set both
> PORT- and DISTVERSION, I have often gotten away by setting PORTVERSION
> (for the FreeBSD site) and DISTNAME (which has the nasty characters the
> vendor inserted) and perhaps telling the bsd.port.mk where the file
> actually unpacked.

The whole point of this discussion is that there are many cases
where DISTVERSION is much more handy than DISTNAME.
Check my previous message and see that many of existing
ports can benefit.

> Check the default for DISTNAME from ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk and put a
> modified copy (with = rather than ?=) into your port's Makefile.

In fact = and ?= would have the same effect, since b.p.m is
included after that.