Tarek Ziadé
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Ben Finney
wrote: Tarek Ziadé
writes: There's a consensus on this in most packaging system out there, and the goal is to have a rational version system that is understandable by most packagers so they can work with python projects versions.
Have you actually read the version comparison specifications of other packaging systems? How do you think they compare to the current draft specification here?
This is very upsetting ! This specification is not something I just pulled out of my hat.
I didn't intend to imply anything like that.
We worked during two evenings during Pycon with people from Fedora and Ubuntu on that (Toshio and Matthias Klose). Those people are packaging Python projects for their systems and have problems because of the lack of proper versioning sometimes.
This is the burden of conferences, and the danger of thinking that a room full of ten people can somehow determine the consensus of the whole community. Ideas that seem great when everyone is face to face still need to be justified at length to the larger community.
But with your "N.N[.X]+" proposal, you are missing some things this PEP tries to adress, such as dealing with alpha, beta and candidate, or development versions.
Then please, point to (or marshal people to write convincingly) the justification for why these complicating factors are needed, and why what they buy is worth the price. The specification and discussion here acknowledges that accommodating the weight of traditional version numbering schemes isn't a primary goal: specifying something useful, obvious, and simple to explain and remember is more important. I'm attempting to cast these special complicating exceptions in that harsh light and see why they should survive.
The RationalVersion class takes your string and split it in several components, does a bit of processing, and then compare the components alphanumerically.
But there are extra rules for some of those components, (like alpha/beta/candidate restriction)
And it is exactly that extra baggage that is in question here. -- \ “Most people don't realize that large pieces of coral, which | `\ have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common | _o__) wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.” —Jack Handey | Ben Finney