[Distutils] PEP440: >1.7 vs >=1.7

[Donald Stufft]

> On Dec 27, 2014, at 9:10 PM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In gives me a minor bit of pause. However any alternative that I can come up
> with bothers me more, especially since I don't believe many people actually
> even *use* a bare > and any alternative I can come up with has worse behavior
> for operators which get much more use.
> 
> what about making >=,<= also use the series concept? where does that go wrong?
> 


To be clear, you’re talking about doing something like:

>1.7 is >1.7 AND !=1.7.* which would correlate to >1.7 OR ==1.7.*?

Honestly, the thing that I dislike about that is it takes a behavior which is
less intuitive (I do agree that the behavior of > is less intuitive) and
applies to globally. I don't think people would expect >=1.7 to match 1.7.dev0
and given that I don't think people would expect >=1.7.0 to _not_match
1.7.dev0.

I totally agree that the behavior of > isn't the greatest, I don't think the
solution to that problem is to globally apply that particular wart. The only
*reasonable* solutions I can think of are:

1. Make < and > both act as simple comparison operators, and have >1.7 and
   >1.7.0 both allow 1.7.1. This would include also allowing 1.7.dev0 to be
   <1.7 and <1.7.0.

2. Make < and > both act as "exclusive comparison operators", and which is
   the current behavior.

3. Make < and > both act as simple comparison operators, but include a special
   case that < does not ever match pre-releases of the version mentioned in
   the specifier. So <3 would not match a pre-released like 3.dev0, and <3.1
   would not match a pre-release like 3.1.dev0 but would match a pre-release
   like 3.0.dev0.

It may be that the correct solution is to just treat pre-releases as special
and just switch to 3.

---
Donald Stufft
PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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