[Python-ideas] module version number support for semver.org

[Jörn Hees]

On 14 Apr 2014, at 23:35, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> The PEP does currently have a semver section. In short, you can't
> really use the -suffix+anothersuffix versions, but you can have x.y.z
> versions where the major version number indicates a backwards
> incompatible change.

yes, there is such a section, but my point is exactly that where the current spec points out that “Semantic versioning is a popular version identification scheme” and then explains where it’s incompatible, we should just allow it as version specs.

Currently there are about 1 % of all version numbers on pypi which show exactly the incompatibility described in http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#semantic-versioning :
I find 432 matches for the regexp "^\d+.\d+.\d+-“ and reviewing them i’m quite convinced that most of them follow semver.
Overall we have 45760 version strings in pypi: [1]
28989 out of the current versions are just 3 numbers (“^\d+.\d+.\d+$”) and could qualify as semver as well.

To me the fact that somewhat between 1 and 64 % of the packages in pypi follow semver is enough to ask why we don’t fully support it and maybe even encourage it.

And yes there is "not much news in semver.org except that it has its own website”, but it’s a pretty short, convincing and easy to understand website. I guess that’s why so many people refer to it.

j

[1]: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/joernhees/10688223/raw/2998db303f3221cf594922bed5a36bcaefc867d3/pypi_versions.txt