[Python-Dev] PEP 396, Module Version Numbers

[John Arbash Meinel]

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...
> #. ``__version_info__`` SHOULD be of the format returned by PEP 386's
>    ``parse_version()`` function.

The only reference to parse_version in PEP 386 I could find was the
setuptools implementation which is pretty odd:

> 
> In other words, parse_version will return a tuple for each version string, that is compatible with StrictVersion but also accept arbitrary version and deal with them so they can be compared:
> 
>>>> from pkg_resources import parse_version as V
>>>> V('1.2')
> ('00000001', '00000002', '*final')
>>>> V('1.2b2')
> ('00000001', '00000002', '*b', '00000002', '*final')
>>>> V('FunkyVersion')
> ('*funkyversion', '*final')

bzrlib has certainly used 'version_info' as a tuple indication such as:

version_info = (2, 4, 0, 'dev', 2)

and

version_info = (2, 4, 0, 'beta', 1)

and

version_info = (2, 3, 1, 'final', 0)

etc.

This is mapping what we could sort out from Python's "sys.version_info".

The *really* nice bit is that you can do:

if sys.version_info >= (2, 6):
  # do stuff for python 2.6(.0) and beyond

Doing that as:

if sys.version_info >= ('000000002', '000000006'):

is pretty ugly.

John
=:->

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