David Cournapeau wrote:
> Greg Ewing wrote:
> 
> > the earlier versions would *never be used*
> > even if they were installed.
> 
> What's the point of having it installed, then ? I am confused.

I never said there was a point. When I mentioned multiple
installed versions, I was talking about multiple *incompatible*
versions.

That part can be handled purely by convention -- just be
disciplined enough to change the package name whenever an
incompatible API change occurs.

But the other part is what happens when there is a
backward-compatible change -- apps need some way to say
what minimum version they need, without having to exactly
match the version installed.

I've already mentioned one way of dealing with that --
install symlinks or .pth files or some such thing pointing
from all the supported minor versions to the one that's
currently installed. But that would cause difficulties
due to different paths to the same module not being
recognised as such.

I think that Python would benefit from having some standard
mechanism added to deal with this. One possibility I thought
of is to extend the import statement so you can say things
like

   import gtk[2,3]

which means "give me gtk with major version == 2 and
minor version >= 3".

Any thoughts on that idea?

-- 
Greg
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