config management capabilities

[Tim]

Hullo
[neophyte writing]

I've been getting different behaviours from simple code running on different
platforms (2.2.2 and 2.1, rh 8.0, windows xp and jython), which I think I've
nailed down to different versions of python modules being installed.

I've seen mechanisms in Distutils for installing modules, but I didn't
notice any general mechanism for managing the standard modules
(up/downgrading the .py? files only), nor any separation of these from the
python distributions (although there's clearly a dependency between some
module versions and python language changes).

Are there any python approaches for ensuring that loaded modules are
suitable versions at runtime?  I think that would mean some standard way of
defining versions for all modules (both interface spec and implementation?),
a way of specifying the dependency and an interrogation technique.

Ideally, I suppose there'd also be some tools/mechanisms for tracking
version compatability.

tia

Tim