On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Ben Finney<[email protected]> wrote: >> We worked during two evenings during Pycon with people from Fedora and >> Ubuntu on that (Toshio and Matthias Klose). Those people are packaging >> Python projects for their systems and have problems because of the >> lack of proper versioning sometimes. > > This is the burden of conferences, and the danger of thinking that a > room full of ten people can somehow determine the consensus of the whole > community. Ideas that seem great when everyone is face to face still > need to be justified at length to the larger community.
I know I won't reach a consensus for the whole community. And there's no need at all to reach it. It's impossible anyway. As a matter of fact, there are already version comparison systems in Distutils, you can read the PEP to have their descriptions. I have extracted their doc. I think the StrictVersion in Distutils is quite similar to what you are describing. No one will force people to use the one we are defining, like no one forced people to use StrictVersion or LooseVersion. But at some point, if you package is being distributed to a wide audience you need an undertsandable versioning scheme, this new version can help. Not because it provides a better version scheme, but just because your consumers will say : "Hey, I know how to read this version number" without having to decrypt it everytime, depending on the projects and the teams. And the problem is that the one that currently exists in Distutils and Setuptools, or the one you have described, doesn't fill that requirement because they are not strict enough from an os-packager point of view (some reasons are mentioned in the PEP) Let's state it differently : this PEP is a proposal for a *strict* versioning comparison tool that what we already have, for an easier understanding of packagers. Maybe we need to write that "how to use version numbers" document at first. Not to say yours is bad or mine is better, but just to write down how release cycles work and how versions increments occurs. Then how each proposal would fit in there. The need of development versions will eventually become obvious for instance. Regards Tarek _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
