On 15/04/2008, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
That's a nice ideal to aim for, but it's only achievable for old and mature packages.
One could change the package name every time the API changes, but then *any* change to the API would make the package unusable by apps expecting an earlier version, even if the new API is backwards compatible.
Is nobody but me seeing shades of Windows "DLL hell" in all of this? Seriously, the problems being discussed here seem very similar to those encountered in the past by Windows with differing versions of DLLs. A number of solutions have been tried, with varying degrees of success. Anyone looking to address this problem for Python, really should take a look at the DLL hell history in Windows, if only to see what types of approach didn't work. Paul.