Erick Branderhorst writes ("Bug#2060: dpkg and depends on version again"): > [...] The ">" character is misleading and in practice it is > interpretated by dpkg as ">=". I would suggest to change the syntax > used in Depends/Conflict/Provides/Recommends/Suggest fields into a > more intuitive way (Table 2). > > [...] > However, changing this now will break almost every Debian > installation. A way to prevent is is to prevent building new packages > with Depends/Conflict/etc fields with "<" or ">" in it, and notify the > maintainer to change this to "<=" or ">=". Installation rules should > remain the same until no more packages have "<" or ">" in it. For > consistency a "=" character should be allowed to indicate that the > mentioned version is requested.
How about <= => for less/greater than or equal to << >> for strictly less/greater than < > for less/greater than or equal to (backwards compatibility, generates warning from dpkg-deb) = for equal to ? = is supported already. Ian.