Feature-Request: pessimistic operator in ports-tree

[Torsten Zuehlsdorff]

Aloha,

i'm working quite a while on the ruby-ports and it is often annoying. 
Even after excessive testing and some more real-world testing (thanks to 
all helpers!) its totally normal, that thinks break.

I found one of the main problems is the pessimistic operator in the 
gemspecs/Gemfiles. Buildtests of all dependencies run fine, we commit 
the update and than some Gem break, because it defined ~> 1.5.2 and you 
just updated to 1.6. In the Makefile >= 1.5.2 says everything is fine.

I personally think most of the rubygem breakage can be prevented by 
teaching the ports-tree about the pessimistic operator. It is far easier 
to build-test 300 dependencies than to really check if they are able to 
start. Or even if they run correctly.

What do you think about this?

Also i believe its not a rubygem only feature. I stumbled across 
multiple software which expect an explicit version or an version range 
or even disallow a single version and accept all other.

Greetings,
Torsten