Phillip J. Eby wrote:

I'm not sure what I think of ' ' as the operator. This change would also have to be an 0.7 feature, as any package that uses it will be dependent on having a setuptools version that understands it, at least in order to build an egg. (We could have egg_info write the expanded forms, so that the built eggs' dependencies would be comprehensible to older versions.)

How about foo~=1.3, meaning foo>=1.3a,<1.4a ? It reads well to me, since it's like "about equal". -- Ian Bicking : ianb@colorstudy.com : http://blog.ianbicking.org : Write code, do good : http://topp.openplans.org/careers

On Jul 6, 2007, at 2:38 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

At 02:09 PM 7/6/2007 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:

...

We (me and a bunch of my Zope friends) find that we'll often want version specifications of the form:

project_name >=Vdev, =1dev, <2dev")

We think this is so common that we'd like a short-hand way of spelling it.

I'll note that I'm not even sure I got the spelling above right. The intent is to request version 1, meaning any release of version 1. I think that's what I spelled above, although I'm not sure. If I got it wrong, maybe someone will correct me. Aside from the verbosity of the spelling above, I think the difficulty in spelling it is a strike against it. Note that a naive spelling: "foo >=1, <2" is wrong because it excludes pre-releases of 1 and includes pre-releases of 2.

I propose that a valid version that ends in a number and that isn't preceded by an operator be a valid version specifier and be interpreted as a range. So, assuming that I know how to spell the range, a specification of:

project_name V (e.g. "foo 1")

would be equivalent to:

project_name >=Vdev, =1dev, <2dev")

This would work with multi-part versions, so "foo 1.2" would be equivalent to "foo >=1.2dev <1.3dev".

Note that this could be combined with other version specifiers. For example, to require any version 1 or 2 of foo or versions 3.2 final or later:

foo 1, 2, >=3.2

Also note that any version will do, so:

foo 1.2a1

would be equivalent to:

foo >=1.2a1dev <1.2a2dev

And note that versions that don't end in numbers wouldn't be valid version specifiers, so:

foo 1a

would not be a valid specifier.

Thoughts?

I'm not sure what I think of ' ' as the operator.

I wasn't suggesting adding '' as an operator. :)

This change would also have to be an 0.7 feature, as any package that uses it will be dependent on having a setuptools version that understands it, at least in order to build an egg.

Yup.

(We could have egg_info write the expanded forms, so that the built eggs' dependencies would be comprehensible to older versions.)

That makes sense. Hm. That's interesting. I hadn't thought through the implication of that. I guess there are all sorts of things that can be done in a setup script to make this work now without changing setuptools. In the long term, I'd like to setuptools support this syntax, however, I suppose there are lots of opportunities to support it in the short term. I'll have to see what I can think of.

I'm also not sure that '1a' can't/shouldn't be a valid specifier, although I suppose it would mean being equal to either ">= 1a.dev, <1b.dev" or ">= 1a0dev, <1a1dev", both of which are a little weird. :)

As I mentioned in my response to Dave, I'm OK with anything since I think this is an extreme edge case, however I think it's best not to guess. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org