[Distutils] Simple idea to resolve versioning problems

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 15 03:01:09 CEST 2008


David Cournapeau wrote:
> what is needed is a stable API for the used packages.

That's a nice ideal to aim for, but it's only achievable
for old and mature packages.

One could change the package name every time the API
changes, but then *any* change to the API would make the
package unusable by apps expecting an earlier version,
even if the new API is backwards compatible.

Having said that, I just realised you can address that
by putting in symlinks for the previous versions.

So, I hereby propose the following convention for naming
of Python packages:

   packagename_<version>

where <version> is a number or other identifier that is
changed whenever the API changes in any way.

If we all follow this convention, we will be able to
install and use multiple versions of a package side-by-side
just as easily as we can Python versions, with no need
for setuptools or any other fancy technology -- just
plain standard Python the way it currently is!

-- 
Greg


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