On 30 August 2000, Paul F. Dubois said:
OK, I'll fix it. But first convince me this "<" really works though? 0.10 vs. 0.9, for example?
It works, depending on how you define "works". In the "strict versioning" scheme, version numbers are dot-separated integer tuples, not floating-point numbers. Thus, "0.10" != "0.1", but "0.1.0" == "0.1" (a slight corruption of the integer-tuple view, made as a concession to reality). This is the version numbering scheme advocated by the GNU project, and by ESR's "Software Release Howto". It works for me, and it's the scheme that will always be used by the Distutils. So yes, it's safe to say if StrictVersion(distutils.__version__) < "0.9" ...except that I use "0.9.2pre" for pre-release development code, which makes StrictVersion blow up. Foo! I think it's time StrictVersion was revisited and made a little less strict, since I'm not *quite* such a version number fascist as I was 18 months ago, when I wrote that code. ;-) Greg