Jim Fulton wrote:
We (me and a bunch of my Zope friends) find that we'll often want version specifications of the form:
project_name >=Vdev, <V+1dev (e.g. "foo >=1dev, <2dev")
We think this is so common that we'd like a short-hand way of spelling it.
I'll note that I'm not even sure I got the spelling above right. The intent is to request version 1, meaning any release of version 1. I think that's what I spelled above, although I'm not sure. If I got it wrong, maybe someone will correct me. Aside from the verbosity of the spelling above, I think the difficulty in spelling it is a strike against it. Note that a naive spelling: "foo >=1, <2" is wrong because it excludes pre-releases of 1 and includes pre-releases of 2.
I hope you got it right because that's exactly the syntax we're using here at Enthought. Well, except that we use a '.dev' instead of a 'dev' :-) And I agree with you that getting it right isn't trivial. It tooks us a couple of attempts and exploring a couple of usecases to figure it out.
I propose that a valid version that ends in a number and that isn't preceded by an operator be a valid version specifier and be interpreted as a range. So, assuming that I know how to spell the range, a specification of:
project_name V (e.g. "foo 1")
would be equivalent to:
project_name >=Vdev, <V+1 (e.g. "foo >=1dev, <2dev")
This would work with multi-part versions, so "foo 1.2" would be equivalent to "foo >=1.2dev <1.3dev".
Note that this could be combined with other version specifiers. For example, to require any version 1 or 2 of foo or versions 3.2 final or later:
foo 1, 2, >=3.2
Also note that any version will do, so:
foo 1.2a1
would be equivalent to:
foo >=1.2a1dev <1.2a2dev
And note that versions that don't end in numbers wouldn't be valid version specifiers, so:
foo 1a
would not be a valid specifier.
I think this all sounds great, except that I'd made the last example valid by assuming it ended with a 0. i.e. foo 1a ==> foo >=1adev, <1a1dev This would be somewhat inline with the current pattern of expanding with zeros to say version 1 is equivalent to 1.0.0.0....0. -- Dave