[Distutils] RFC : Version comparison

[Trent Mick]

> I'd be in favor of replacing the 'b' and 'post' and so forth with
> symbolic constants - eg, RationalVersion((1, 0, RationalVersion.POST, 345)).
> If not that, then I'd at least like 'final' instead of 'f', 'beta' instead
> of 'b' (is that what 'b' means?) - since this doesn't necessarily need to
> be tied to how the version is serialized: it's for programmers to type, so
> the more obvious it is what things mean, the better.

Yes, it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to the version
serialization, but there is some elegance if this is the case. Granted
the 'f' for 'final' isn't obvious, but in the context of version
strings 'b' for 'beta' and 'a' for 'alpha' is pretty obvious, no? The
'f' is just internal, anyway. I'd rather not get into the situation
where we start allowing both "b" and "beta" as arguments to the
constructor to mean the same thing.

If people thought it would help, I'd be cool with:

  RationalVersion.BETA = 'b'

et al.

Trent

-- 
Trent Mick
trentm at gmail.com