On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> wrote:

It occurs to me that this problem would go away if we had a way to ask, for any given version number, 'what was your creation date' and the sorting 'earlier' and 'later' by that date.  Can somebody explain why we aren't doing this?

You mean like a timestamp before or after the version ? I might be wrong but I think that would be similar to what RPM calls an Epoch. A number that can be used to compare two packages when their versions number don't follow the standard scheme anymore. But that's just a fallback. But for the sake of simplicity and standardization, this extra number is avoided. Meaning that it would be better to define and use a standard for the released packages, than introducing a timestamp and say: do whatever you want with your version numbers. At some point, we all agree that MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO is an accepted standard and we are arguing about pre/post/dev releases. My point is that we are able to define a public scheme for those too, so all package installers share the same conventions. This doesn't imply that developers have to use it internally. It just implies that, if the developer releases his package at some point to PyPI, he will know *how* his version number will be sorted by package managers, because it's documented in a PEP. e.g. a shared convention. Regards Tarek