[Distutils] easy_install should consider the development status of packages

[Alexander Michael]

On 9/15/07, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> currently, lxml has both a stable release series (1.3.x) and an unstable alpha
> release series (2.0alphaX) on PyPI. When you "easy_install lxml", you get the
> 2.0alpha version. I don't think that's what users expect and it's definitely
> not what most users want, but at the same time I would like to keep 2.0
> visible and easy_install-able to make people aware of it and to let them
> decide by themselves.
>
> I would like to have easy_install changed to either consider the Trove
> development status of a package and prefer the highest one (or at least those
> from 5 up), and/or to check the version string for the typical alpha/beta
> substrings and ignore them by default. It would then be easy to add a command
> line option like "--unstable" for those who know better.
>
> Any comments on that?

A related desire of mine is to have both the latest stable release of
an egg and the latest development release installed with *the latest
stable release being the default* (i.e. listed, with all its stable
dependencies, in easy-install.pth). Something along the lines of an -M
option, which like -m, performs a multi-version install but doesn't
touch easy-install.pth. I'm not sure if this is feasible (or maybe it
is even already possible!), but it sounds nice to me. :)

Regards,
Alex