
At 11:12 AM 4/22/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Hi,
We worked during Pycon on version comparisons. Distutils has one but it is a bit strict, setuptools has another one, but it's a bit heuristic.
We would like to propose the inclusion for Python 2.7 of a new version comparison algorithm, based on the discussion Fedora, Ubuntu and Python people had. The plan would be to deprecate the current one (which is not really used anyway) and provide, promote this one.
Trent Mick took the lead on this work at the end of Pycon, and worked on a prototype.
It's explained here, and there's an implementation (I've put it at the top of the page for conveniency):
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/VersionComparison
Please comment,
I don't see how it can manage, e.g. a development version of a postrelease, with an SVN rev or date stamp on it. Such versions might not be found on PyPI or on RPMs, but would be needed in development. (Btw, the wiki page pseudo-regex doesn't match what the code actually parses, either.)