At 03:16 PM 6/11/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
2009/6/11 P.J. Eby <pje@telecommunity.com>:
PyPI uploads aren't a suitable basis for analyzing "dev" use cases, since the whole point of having a "dev" tag is for *non-released* versions. (E.g., in-progress development via SVN.)
If it's non-released, I've yet to see a clear explanation of why the PEP is relevant. Who is going to use an API from the PEP to parse your "version number", and why?
Dev tags are so that while you're doing development, your locally-installed versions can be distinguished from one another.
Distinguished by what? What code (that you didn't write yourself, purely for internal use) needs to parse your dev tag?
Distinguished by setuptools for processing version requirements of scripts, or require() statements in code, and installation requirements of newly-installed code. For example, if I'm working on two projects that are distributed via SVN and one depends on the other, if I update one, it may require an update of the other; the failure of the .dev#### version requirement in the first one will inform me of the need to "svn up" the second project and rerun "setup.py develop" on it. This is a routine circumstance in at least my development cycle; I would expect that it's the case in other open source development workflows as well as proprietary ones.