Re: [Distutils] A tale of two conventions: Incompatibility of version comparison semantics

On Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:08:33 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:

Floris Bruynooghe writes:

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On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 08:10:05PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:

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Well then, I don't see a way forward on the issue of helping distributors to manage version numbers sanely. I don't know of any operating system package manager that returns different comparison results depending on what specific letters are used in the version string.

Alpha, beta and release candidate releases have been around for ages and I imagine most distributors have figured out a way of coping with this.

That doesn't answer the point raised, though. Isn't a major reason for all this work to help the downstream distributors to help migrate *away* from munging version strings and toward version strings that compare sanely as-is?

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In Debian's case 1.0a1 would become 1.0~a1 for example (IIRC), which sorts before 1.0.

That's exactly the sort of hack I would hope would no longer be necessary for version strings formed under an improved version comparison specification.

Forgive me for saying so, but this looks strongly like abandoning the criterion of “make it easier for distributors than it is at present”.

By having this standard, distributors do have an easier time. They can transform these version numbers automatically, just as they do many other things to upstream packages automatically to turn them into a distro package. So no, the goal of making it easier for distributors is not being abandoned. Jean-Paul