David Cournapeau wrote:
Greg Ewing wrote:
the earlier versions would *never be used* even if they were installed.
What's the point of having it installed, then ? I am confused.
I never said there was a point. When I mentioned multiple installed versions, I was talking about multiple *incompatible* versions. That part can be handled purely by convention -- just be disciplined enough to change the package name whenever an incompatible API change occurs. But the other part is what happens when there is a backward-compatible change -- apps need some way to say what minimum version they need, without having to exactly match the version installed. I've already mentioned one way of dealing with that -- install symlinks or .pth files or some such thing pointing from all the supported minor versions to the one that's currently installed. But that would cause difficulties due to different paths to the same module not being recognised as such. I think that Python would benefit from having some standard mechanism added to deal with this. One possibility I thought of is to extend the import statement so you can say things like import gtk[2,3] which means "give me gtk with major version == 2 and minor version >= 3". Any thoughts on that idea? -- Greg