[Distutils] Common version-comparison semantics for peace love and harmony (was: PEP 386 status - last round here ?)

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> That makes me think that a nice add-on to the lib and the PEP would be
>> to provide APIs to translate a Python PEP 386 version to a
>> Debian/Ubuntu or RPM ones - and any major packaging system out there.
>> (whatever scheme we pick)
>
> I'd like to register, once again, the point that this would not *be* a
> problem if PEP 386 described a version comparison scheme that simply
> works without special keywords. Have each segment compared
> alphanumerically, and it will not *need* translation to work with other
> packaging systems.
>
> Special keywords are not, I maintain, special enough to break the normal
> version-comparison semantics.

Not sure what you mean by special keywords. If it's about 'post' and
'dev', the problem we have is to be able to sort those post and pre
releases with other versions.  And this is not possible with a simple
alphanumerical
comparison.

And this is not a special use case, and has to be part imho of our
version-comparison semantics.
otherwise, our scheme would be useless for developers that work as a
daily basis with snapshots,
dev versions etc.

Tarek