[Distutils] PEP 386 status - last round here ?

[Piotr Ozarowski]

[ssteinerX at gmail.com, 2009-11-27]
> > 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)
> 
> Wouldn't it be cool if the package that goes along with this PEP
> became the standard version checker used by ALL of these
> distributions?

used where? In Debian we don't touch upstream code in order to adjust it
to our version schema, so although package version is 4:0.1~alpha1+r23-5
module.__version__ still returns 0.1alpha1 or 0.1a.svn23. It only
matters for tools like uscan that look for new upstream releases and
prepare tarball names for us.

Please also note that such translations can only be a hint, you cannot
rely on it. Imagine situation where upstream author changes version
schema from YYYYMMDD to X.Y.Z, we simply bump epoch so after 20091127-1
comes 1:5.6.7-1, how would you know that epoch bump was needed without
knowing the history of the package?

We cannot really trust versions in requires.txt/install_requires/etc.
either (so there's no need to translate them) as we have to double check
these versions in most modules anyway (they're usually too low, too
high or simply missing).
-- 
Piotr Ożarowski                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer
www.ozarowski.pl          www.griffith.cc           www.debian.org
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