[Distutils] pre-release versioning problems with sdist, bdist_rpm, bdist_debian

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net> wrote:
> Thanks Tarek.  I think if it would do the same thing as bdist_rpm that it
> would be ok.  bdist_rpm looks like it does VERSION-RELEASE (hyphen
> separator).    So then doing this for 'sdist' I guess would produce a
> tarball name of foo-VERSION-RELEASE.tar.gz  and an extracted directory of
> foo-VERSION-RELEASE.   What this would allow then is for the 'version'
> string to stay at '5.0.0' and then the 'release' string to contain any
> pre-release information such as '0_rc1' and then the final release would
> contain '1' which is lexically superior to the '0_rc1'.  I'm not sure though
> what other targets in distutils also use 'version' so I don't know if this
> would affect anything else.
>
> Updating my comment:   Yes, and all the 'bdist' targets would have to do the
> same type of thing as 'bdist_rpm'.  That is use the combination of
> VERSION-RELEASE.
>
> Also, I'm hoping this can be implemented as some kind of extension so that
> it can be made to work for existing installations as well.

In other words, introduce it globally. That is a big change,

I think this could stay compatible with the previous installations as long as :

- if the release string is not specified, then it is not used at all,
  (unlike version which becomes 0.0 when not specified)

- the "Package-Version-Release" string is OK with the tools out there
  (I have to double-check on how setuptools and zc.buildout works on
fragments to extract version numbers  for instance)

I can't think of other issues at the moment, but I am pretty sure there are more

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
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