[Python-Dev] Relative Package Imports

[Greg Ward]

On 14 September 1999, Tim Peters said:
> + Dealing with incompatible versions of packages.  If someone wants to embed
> a copy of (say) mxDateTime in their own package, the only excuses are that
> they're afraid of overwriting the user's existing mxDateTime installation
> (if any), and/or of having some future installation of something else
> overwrite mxDateTime with an incompatible version.  Those are bad problems,
> but package embedding is no solution.  You have a much better approach to
> that already via the DateTime.__version__ string!  "Something like that"
> needs to be formalized and imposed on all public packages.
> 
> at-which-point-the-distutils-sig-jumps-in-and-saves-the-day-ly y'rs  - tim

Been there, tried that, bought the flame war.  I made the mistake of
kicking off the Distutils SIG back in Decemver with a proposal for a
standard version numbering scheme for Python module distributions.  See

  http://www.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/1998-December/000016.html

for the kick-off of that "heated discussion".  ;-)

FWIW, if I was posting that message today, I would s/must/should/ and
that's about it.  And I would stress that these are "Proposed
Recommended Guidelines" rather than "Things You Must Do or Distutils
Will Slam the Door in Your Face", which is what it must have sounded
like based on some of the responses.

Folks: please don't reheat this flamewar on python-dev -- if you're
interested in it, it will undoubtedly come up again on distutils-sig in
due course!

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
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