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

[Ben Finney]

Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Ben Finney<ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > This is the burden of conferences, and the danger of thinking that a
> > room full of ten people can somehow determine the consensus of the
> > whole community. Ideas that seem great when everyone is face to face
> > still need to be justified at length to the larger community.
> 
> I know I won't reach a consensus for the whole community. And there's
> no need at all to reach it. It's impossible anyway.

You seem to think “consensus” means “unanimous agreement”; that's
not what it means. For consensus, it's only necessary that the group as
a whole acts on the belief that agreement has been reached; it doesn't
need to extend to every individual member.

That doesn't make getting the consensus of the Python community *easy*;
but it's certainly not impossible.

> And the problem is that the [version comparison algorithm] that
> currently exists in Distutils and Setuptools, or the one you have
> described, doesn't fill that requirement because they are not strict
> enough from an os-packager point of view (some reasons are mentioned
> in the PEP)

The one I've described is exactly as strict as the one in the current
draft (though I haven't formally described it). The difference is not in
strictness, but simplicity.

> Let's state it differently : this PEP is a proposal for a *strict*
> versioning comparison tool that what we already have, for an easier
> understanding of packagers.

Yes, I agree that strictness is essential to being able to apply such an
algorithm automatically. That's not in dispute.

-- 
 \      “God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as |
  `\                  indefensible as infanticide.” —Dame Rebecca West |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney