[Distutils] Comparison semantics for alphanumeric components of a version number

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Ben Finney<ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> There's a consensus on this in most packaging system out there, and
>> the goal is to have a rational version system that is understandable
>> by most packagers so they can work with python projects versions.
>
> Have you actually read the version comparison specifications of other
> packaging systems? How do you think they compare to the current draft
> specification here?

This is very upsetting !   This specification is not something I just
pulled out of my hat.

We worked during two evenings during Pycon with people from Fedora and
Ubuntu on
that (Toshio and Matthias Klose). Those people are packaging Python projects
for their systems and have problems because of the lack of proper
versioning sometimes.

We were like +10 people the first night brainstorming on that topic.

The proposal is something that everyone agreed was "good enough" there for
packagers to work with.

The only complexity we (I in fact) added later is the use case Philip
brought up for the post-releases,
and this something we are currently discussing in details in the ML/

But with your "N.N[.X]+" proposal,  you are missing some things this
PEP tries to adress,
such as dealing with alpha, beta and candidate, or development versions.

>
> I don't see how this is relevant. I'm not talking about removing the
> need for dividing a version string into separately-comparable
> components. That's clearly useful, and anyway is pretty uncontroversial
> and widespread.
> I'm arguing that, having got those components, and needing to compare
> them *within an individual component position* for ordering, the best
> candidate for “simple to describe and remember, and obvious to guess”
> is that the components are compared alphanumerically with no special
> exceptions.

The RationalVersion class takes your string and split it in several components,
does a bit of processing, and then compare the components alphanumerically.

But there are extra rules for some of those components, (like
alpha/beta/candidate restriction)