In PEP440, foo-X.Y.Z does not satisfy the specifier "foo>X.Y" (although it satisfies "foo>=X.Y")
for example, foo-1.7.2 will not satisfy "foo>1.7", but it will satisfy "foo>=1.7"
for '>' and '<', PEP440 states that they are "interpreted as implying the prefix based version
exclusion clause
!= V.*"in brief, this was done to avoid pre-releases (i.e. something like "foo-1.7a1") satisfying "foo<1.7".
It seems to me we've just traded one confusion for another, and this seems worse (to me at least, although I'm trying to let it sink in)
1.7.2 is greater than 1.7, and the specifiers should honor that. It's hard to accept otherwise.
Yes, it's true in the past, when people would get a pre-release installed (for example 1.7a1), when they really wanted something in the 1.6.X series, that was also confusing. But now that pip now excludes pre-releases by default, it seems that confusion is mostly solved practically speaking, so why solve it (and create a new confusion)?
It’s true that pip doesn’t install pre-releases by default (assuming there is any final releases available), but that doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem - it just masks it. When people put ``foo<8`` in their install_requires they generally do not expect to get ``8.0.dev0``, and in my opinion, they shouldn’t get ``8.0.dev0`` even if someone uses —pre.
In a way, we have replaced one confusion for another, although I do not believe it to be that bad and I believe that the current situation is better because:
* In my searches of github and my experience, use of the > instead of >= is fairly limited, meanwhile use of < to mean how it’s interpreted now is far more common.
* The new behavior maintains consistency between < and >, so that specifiers that “look” the same act the same, maintaining consistency between them.
* I think that having the > and < behavior vary is a *worse* confusion, and I believe that the behavior of < is far better than previous.
In particular, <, >, ~=, and, when using a .*, the != and == use the number of dots in the given specifier to indicate the precision of the specifier.
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Donald Stufft
PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA