PEP262 - database of installed packages

[David Ascher]

Andrew Kuchling wrote:

> Here's another question: is there any explanation of how version
> numbers are handled?  distutils/version.py has extensive examples in
> the docstrings for the StrictVersion and LooseVersion classes, and I'm
> wondering how they'd be mapped to PPD's version tuples.  The PPD man
> page on aspn.activestate.com gives an example version tuple as
> "4,2,0,0", but it's not clear how that maps to a version number, or
> what a version number such as 2.2.1a3 would be translated to as a
> tuple.

The current PPM3 does version comparison on the server using an
algorithm which was designed for Perl (conversion to tuple is done
through the equivalent of tuple(foo.split('.')).  We could change it to
do whatever makes sense for Python.

There are lots of other questions which come up that I mean to bring up
in the discussion of the PEP.  For example, I don't particularly like
the fact that bdist_wininst creates a separate "program" in the
Add/Remove dialog on Windows.  I know why it does, but it'd be nice to
have something more granular and Python-specific, and that scaled a bit
better.

Having struggled with distutils/PPM interactions a fair bit in the last
few weeks, I'm keen to help come up with a solution which works for
distutils, Python and PPM.

Let's continue this discussion on the distutils-sig?  

--david