[Distutils] RFC PEP 386 : Version comparisons

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Tres Seaver<tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
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> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>
>> back to that discussion, after re-reading all the threads I have a proposal :
>>
>> 1- let's add as we said "install_requires" in PEP 345 and describe in
>> it that people can define requirements,
>>   but without giving them rules for the version schemes.
>>
>>   We will just write in that PEP that it's up to the *dependency
>> manager* (pip, setuptools, zc.buildout, etc)
>>   to provide a cmp() for the version.
>>
>>   The only rule will be that each dependency is described like this :
>>
>>      dist_name [<|>|==|!=|>=|<=] version
>>
>>   where version is free and dist_name in [a-zA-Z0-9]
>>
>> 2- let's drop PEP 386 completely
>
> - -1.  I would rather exclude some use cases (post releases), than drop
> standardization altogether.

Would you be OK to say in PEP 345 that a suggested tool to compare
versions could be
verlib (released as a third-party software), but that any system could
also be used to compare versions ?

So we can move on and propose the PEP 345 change unindependantly from
a version comparison tool.

In conjunction, we could deprecate the existing version comparison
code in Distutils and
state that is not Distutils' role to provide such a feature. Then work
on PEP 386 separately and maybe
one day propose its inclusion.