[Distutils] Common version-comparison semantics for peace love and harmony

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Sat Nov 28 11:11:07 CET 2009


2009/11/28 Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se>:
> In a message of Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:27:14 +0100, Tarek Ziadé writes:
>>On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:
>>> It occurs to me that this problem would go away if we had a way to
>>> ask, for any given version number, 'what was your creation date' and
>>> the sorting 'earlier' and 'later' by that date.  Can somebody explain
>>> why we aren't doing this?
>>
>>You mean like a timestamp before or after the version ?
>>
>>I might be wrong but I think that would be similar to what RPM calls
>>an Epoch. A number that can be used to compare two packages when their
>>versions number don't follow the standard scheme anymore. But that's
>>just a fallback.
>>But for the sake of simplicity and standardization, this extra number
>>is avoided.
>>
>>Meaning that it would be better to define and use a standard for the
>>released packages, than introducing a timestamp and say: do whatever
>>you want with your version numbers.
>
> But I think that it is the other way around ... what we want is a
> timestamp.  The algorithm is for guessing which version is ealier
> in the absence of a timestamp.
>
>>At some point, we all agree that MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO is an accepted
>>standard and we are arguing about pre/post/dev releases.
>
> We have no way to enforce this on the world.

Actually, there is: refuse any packages on pypi which does not follow
the standard. In exchange of using the standard (whatever it ends up
being), you can use pypi.

David


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