[Distutils] Requirent specifiers specified? :)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:54 PM 6/22/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>In any case, I expect that having people build tools on top of
>setuptools is a use case
>you anticipated.  For people to do that, they sometimes need precise
>specifications
>of behavior.

Of course -- but I didn't anticipate that they would need anything more 
than the ability to test whether a version matches a requirement.  Given 
all of the tradeoffs involved, including at least:

* similarity to version specifiers used in other packaging tools (e.g. RPM)
* ease of comprehension and simplicity of expressing common use cases

I chose to lean in favor of an approach that handles reasonable cases 
reasonably, and provides repeatable answers always.

Also, at some point, one does what one can with the available 
manpower.  Bob Ippolito was the only person besides me who was actively 
involved in the design process at the time -- and he was kind of like, 
"whatever, man" on the subject.  :)  It would've been nice to have had your 
participation then.  Now, we'll pretty much have to live with what we've got.