[Distutils] Attempted summary of version number thread

[Fred L. Drake]

Greg Ward writes:
 > control freaks (me, Fred, and Konrad -- at least you two said you agree
...
 > So: do any of you object to the above characterizations?  I'd be

Greg,
  I can live with being a control freak; I hear this at home, too.  ;) 
  As far as the relationship with the rest of the distutils
deliverables is concerned, there's a lot which is not related to the
versioning issue, and there's no reason to let versioning delay other
aspects of the project.  All of the build/install/package code is
independent of versioning.
  Versioning is important with regard to dependencies, both for
dependency declarations for a package and availability analysis for
locating dependency implementations.  For this, some sort of reqiures/ 
provides model with version comparisons may be appropriate.  As far as 
this goes, comparability of version numbers is more important than a
specific scheme, so I'm inclined to accept that multiple versioning
"schemes" be possible and have each be identifiable by name.  A
default that is somewhere between the "control freak" model and Greg
Stein's variant should be fairly usable.
  Mark Hammond's "build number" approach seems to fit the syntactic
model just fine; he's only using the first number, and it can get
large.  But that's ok for our immediate purposes, and compatibility
analysis will probably require explicit statements of compatibility of 
various aspects (API, back-end data, whatever makes sense for each) on 
a per-release basis anyway.
  Using a requires/provides model allows each package to "provide" a
number of "aspects" which can be independently versioned, as well.  So 
each data format or API can be versioned independently.  My frobnitz
package can then do the following:

	requires xml-omnibus-package 0.6
	provides frobnitz-data 1.0
	provides frobnitz-API 1.0
	provides frobnitz-API 1.1


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Dr.	    Reston, VA  20191