2009/11/28 Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se>:
In a message of Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:27:14 +0100, Tarek Ziadé writes:
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> wrote:
It occurs to me that this problem would go away if we had a way to ask, for any given version number, 'what was your creation date' and the sorting 'earlier' and 'later' by that date. Can somebody explain why we aren't doing this?
You mean like a timestamp before or after the version ?
I might be wrong but I think that would be similar to what RPM calls an Epoch. A number that can be used to compare two packages when their versions number don't follow the standard scheme anymore. But that's just a fallback. But for the sake of simplicity and standardization, this extra number is avoided.
Meaning that it would be better to define and use a standard for the released packages, than introducing a timestamp and say: do whatever you want with your version numbers.
But I think that it is the other way around ... what we want is a timestamp. The algorithm is for guessing which version is ealier in the absence of a timestamp.
At some point, we all agree that MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO is an accepted standard and we are arguing about pre/post/dev releases.
We have no way to enforce this on the world.
Actually, there is: refuse any packages on pypi which does not follow the standard. In exchange of using the standard (whatever it ends up being), you can use pypi. David