This allows the dependency to be resolved in the particular use case:

eb --try-toolchain=intel,2019b --robot --experimental --try-update-deps BioPerl-1.7.2-intel-2018b-Perl-5.28.0.eb -D

but an alternative match actually exists, XML-LibXML-2.0201-GCCcore-8.3.0.eb, this isn't chosen because we changed convention and decided to drop the Perl suffix recently. We can't predict a change in convention, howver you could build in logic to account for this...but we would first need to agree on exactly what our conventions are :P

If this were me I would recommend doing a dry run with the --copy-ec parameter:

eb --try-toolchain=intel,2019b --robot --experimental --try-update-deps --copy-ec -D BioPerl-1.7.2-intel-2018b-Perl-5.28.0.eb my_tweaked_ecs

then going in and fiddling with the dep to use the latest version and then building things.

I guess I could add a feature to provide a warning if there is a case where a version exists without a versionsuffix and is newer (would be particularly useful for Python versionsuffixes I suspect).

I'll open an issue for this rather than consider it here, it's non-trivial.