On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:12:22 +0200, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
We worked during Pycon on version comparisons. Distutils has one but it is a bit strict, setuptools has another one, but it's a bit heuristic.
We would like to propose the inclusion for Python 2.7 of a new version comparison algorithm, based on the discussion Fedora, Ubuntu and Python people had. The plan would be to deprecate the current one (which is not really used anyway) and provide, promote this one.
Trent Mick took the lead on this work at the end of Pycon, and worked on a prototype.
It's explained here, and there's an implementation (I've put it at the top of the page for conveniency):
Clearly being able to parse the string representation is important, since this information will largely reside in non-Python text files. I suppose that many people will also be very comfortable with and happy about writing RationalVersion(somestring) and ">=somestring". However, it would also be great if there were a way to construct a version object out of structured data instead. Can a constructor which takes each part of the version data as a separate object be added? Jean-Paul