[Distutils] recollections of Pycon distutils versioning discussion (part 2)

[Paul Moore]

2009/6/11 Trent Mick <trentm at gmail.com>:
> Those are my recollections of the Pycon versioning discussions. I want to
> following up (in a separate email) with my current opinions.

Thank you for posting this. It helps *a lot*.

Some questions that come immediately to mind:

1. From your description of events, and from discussion here, the
"post" tag is clearly the least thought through aspect of all this. So
a proponent of this should step up to justify why 1.0.5.post3 is
required, when 1.0.5.3 is available already.

2. It sounds like all of the discussions were focused on formalising a
*definition* of version string syntax, with no mention of what use
would be made of the definition (i.e., what software benefits from a
well-defined version-parsing API). Can someone please enumerate the
expected use cases for the new version parsing API? The obvious one is
dependency handling - I'll add my thoughts on this separately. I can't
think of any other compelling use cases.

Paul.