Greg Ward writes:
* replace [ab] with [a-z], to allow test versions beyond "beta"... although any programmer who goes up to "zeta" (or should that be omega?) really needs to look at his quality control... ;-)
Make it [ab] and don't change it unless there are substantial complaints (meaning someone actually wants to use something else and can present a good argument for doing so, *not* that someone might theoretically want to).
* make the patch number optional (and treat 1.0 and 1.0.0 as the same version number)
Definately. In fact, I'd want to hide the patch number if it's 0. If the version number class is distutils.version.Number, this should happen: >>> from distutils.version import Number >>> v = Number("1.0.0a1") >>> str(v) '1.0a1'
Quoth John Skaller (2 December 1998):
No, that isn't enough. Consider:
MacVersion UnixVersion NTVersion
I think that platform differences can be handled by the naming scheme for built distributions. For instance, version 1.3.2 of module 'foo' might be distributed under the following names:
I agree. The version number should not be platform dependent, as that can only create confusion.
Now consider:
FreeVersion Commercial Version
and then:
BareBones version Delux Version Everything including the Kitchen Sink Version
I see these are basically the same: different releases of essentially the same product but with varying degrees of functionality. (Where
These are different products and should have different base names. Your examples describe this effectively.
Finally, Greg Stein raised the following wrinkle in private email:
I wanted to briefly let you know that Apache modules are typically versioned as: 0.9.3-1.3.3. The first set refers to the module itself. The second set refers to Apache (which is currently at 1.3.3).
This is a dependency issue, and the dependency checking component should be able to deal with version numbers as appropriate. This is how other packaging systems deal with it (to the best of my knowledge, which is not comprehensive ;). -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake@acm.org> Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Dr. Reston, VA 20191