
Another penny dropped when it comes to version specs.
Should 2.5 mean 2.5.0 only, or 2.5.*. Well... why would you ever need to specify 2.5.0 only. That's a nonsense specification.
"My project requires Python 2.5.0, but doesn't work with 2.5.1". Huh!? Well, then fix it, goofball. :)
This == operator is fairly common in Debian. For example, the apache2 package installed on my system specifies Package: apache2 Version: 2.2.14-4 Depends: apache2-mpm-worker (= 2.2.14-4) | apache2-mpm-prefork (= 2.2.14-4) | apache2-mpm-event (= 2.2.14-4) | apache2-mpm-itk (= 2.2.14-4), apache2.2-common (= 2.2.14-4) So they specify that the packages they need have *exactly* to come from the same build. Otherwise, slight binary incompatibilities may break the thing - and there is no point in risking that. For Python, applications should probably be more tolerant wrt. versioning. However, some people do want to lock dependencies to a specific version, for better reproducability.
The following would be illegal:
Requires-Python: >= 2.5.2 > 3 Requires-Python: <= 2.5.2 < 3 Requires-Python: <= 2.5.2 < 3 > 3.1
-1. I would prefer if there is only a single syntax for specifying version dependencies, independent of what metadata field they appear in. Regards, Martin