[Pythonmac-SIG] Package Manager idea, adding a URL scheme

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Wed Oct 1 15:39:55 EDT 2003


On Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003, at 15:33 America/New_York, Ronald Oussoren 
wrote:

>
> On 1 okt 2003, at 21:23, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>>>
>>> That won't work whenever we get around releasing pyobjc-1.0, as 
>>> "1.0" < "1.0b1" :-(.
>>
>> We need to standardize on a way to do this, obviously..  The string 
>> comparison thing is bad, and the scapegoat has to figure out how to 
>> find the version for each package (which isn't always possible, 
>> because not every package includes this metadata).
>>
>> There should be a standard sys.version_info way of getting package 
>> versions.
>
> Not necessarily. It would be nice if every package used the same 
> layout of the version string (maybe the scheme used by python itself), 
> but the Linux package manager seem to have an pretty accurate 
> heuristic for comparing versions. Borrowing that heuristic would also 
> work.

Can you find a reference for this?  I'm not even sure which Linux 
package manager you're referring to.

> BTW. I just noted that PackMan (the GUI) doesn't have an 'uninstall' 
> option. That makes it harder to throw away packages that are not 
> really needed.

You would either need to keep receipts, or the scapegoat would have to 
maintain an "uninstall program" for each package.  Receipts is probably 
the way to go here, and that would at least partially solve the 
version-number-string problem (because the scapegoat wouldn't 
necessarily have to maintain a version checker for each package, but 
that would be incompatible with packages that the user installed 
themselves unless distutils was modified to support receipts).

-bob




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