On 17 December 2014 at 13:31, Ethan Furman <[email protected]> wrote: > Oh, to be clear: There are no guarantees that 1.4 actually includes the > bug-fixes in +debian1, correct? It's just a > big hope?
Correct. The local versions were mostly added such that Linux distros could indicate to Python specific tools when patches had been applied using the distro packaging system. This is actually a pretty normal practice (especially in a long lived distro like RHEL/CentOS - our version numbers indicate the *baseline* version of a package), but it's currently completely invisible to the Python level tooling (a patched distro provided package will currently report the same Python level version metadata as a pristine upstream package). The promise we make is that any such patches shouldn't break compatibility at all (that's the whole point of the baseline+backports long term support model), which is why the comparison semantics are defined to ignore them by default. That lets us incorporate security fixes (for example) without breaking anything, while still providing an indication that something has changed in the software. Whether those patches make their way upstream will depend on the patch and the upstream project. Some distro integration patches (like pip dependency unbundling) will never go upstream. Others will be backports of bug fixes from later upstream feature releases to earlier versions that are integrated into the distro. And some will be patches that distros apply because we need them quickly for some reason, and then subsequently work through the process of getting the change (or a variant thereof) accepted upstream (because carrying downstream patches long term is expensive, we prefer not to do it if we don't have to). So while the usage model Maurits describes here is valid (and should work with setuptools 8 + pip 6), it isn't really the primary intended use case - it's aimed at when you're installing Python packages but using something other than the Python specific tooling to do it (e.g. apt-get, yum, conda, etc). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
