[IronPython] IronPython 1.0.1 Released!

[Anthony Baxter]

On 10/11/06, Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/10/11, Anthony Baxter <anthonybaxter at gmail.com>:
> > Right now, there is no easy way (aside from parsing sys.version) to
> > say "is this code running on CPython or IronPython." And, as I started
> > this thread, the format of sys.version changed from 1.0 to 1.0.1.
>
> Not true. Testing for sys.platform == 'cli' is easy and exact.

That's a bad choice. sys.platform under CPython has a bunch of
different values. But in the meantime, I guess it's the best we have.


> sys.version format change is unfortunate, but it was done to provide
> *more* information. Hopefully special casing 1.0 only would be enough
> and IronPython team would keep the format from 1.0.1 on.

I guess I'm used to point releases not changing user-visible things.
Something like this, which is the only way to get the IronPython
release, was not a good thing to change.

> > As far as sys.version_info claiming to be Python 2.4 - I can sort of
> > understand that from a pragmatic point of view. But it leaves me with
> > a bad feeling - it's all too similar to almost every http client
> > identifying themselves as "Mozilla 4.0 (Actual Browser Name Here)".
>
> Indeed. But far too many softwares test for sys.hexversion and
> sys.version_info to change that. Maybe it's better to change
> documentation to say that hexversion and version_info are intended to
> represent "language specification", not "language implementation"?

I guess that's what I was saying. For what it's worth, almost all uses
of sys.version_info checking I'm aware of are of the form of "is this
version X or higher" or "version X or lower" - because a particular
bugfix or new feature is only in that version. That's why the "this
magic string is version X, this is version Y, ..." is such a bad
approach. I have Python packages that last had a "release" 4 or 5
years ago[1]. They still work fine. If I had to re-release them for a
new version where nothing else changed, I'd be sad.

Anthony

[1] Why don't they have new releases? Largely, because they work fine.
I don't see the need to add features that aren't needed :)