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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Paul Moore<p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/6/5 Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>:
>> No one will force people to use the one we are defining, like no one
>> forced people
>> to use StrictVersion or LooseVersion.
>
> But it's being defined via a PEP (rather than hidden in the code, as
> with Strict/LooseVsersion) so it has a higher level of visibility and
> authoritativeness. So it should be held to higher standards. Maybe I
> won't be forced to use it, but I suspect I will be *expected* to. And
> quite possibly disadvantaged if I don't.

Probably so yes, if you use the install_requires field PEP 345 introduces,
where you will define dependencies with their versions.

And if you don't use dev. flags for example, you will have to deal with them
if they are present in other projects you depend on. It's a real need.

We could use the setuptools standard here, because it's the de-facto
standard for this metadata today, (and that's what I have proposed
first during the Pycon sessions), but some use cases were raised
and the work+proposal you see in PEP 386 followed.

I see only advantages on having a strict, well-documented standard
for versions numbers., that we know is good enough for non-python
packagers.

Let's see what is going to come out of the other threads (with Phillip
and Trent on the edge case). I do believe we can have something that'll reach
consensus at some point when these edge cases are resolved,
because the whole thing will probably work with much simpler cases
like you have shown;

At least I hope we all agree that : 2009.05.12 is not a good version number,
and that we all want a major/minor scheme.

Regards
Tarek