Tarek Ziadé <ziade.ta...@gmail.com> writes: > http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutilsversion/src/tip/README.txt > > The goal here is to provide a version comparison standard to be > included in Distutils.
I laud this goal, and thank you for soliciting feedback on this draft. One thing I haven't seen discussed: Why have such baroque version comparison semantics been accepted? Surely one of the overarching goals for such a standard is that it be simple to comprehend, and to behave unsurprisingly to most users. Yet the discussion around these non-obvious semantics, trying to have components interpreted as “pre-release” and “post-release” and “development release” and so on seem to underline the fact that they're *not* something that there's any consensus on. So why are they being foisted into a standard for version strings? Rather than trying to force non-alphanumeric comparison semantics for alphabetic sequences, why not simply say that alphanumeric comparison semantics apply for components? That would, at a stroke, end all this turmoil and IMO futile seeking of some other consensus, when the best consensus is already what most would expect: alphanumeric comparison. At the least, I would expect there would need to be a demonstrated, significantly unified consensus for some specific *other* semantic before discarding straightforward alphanumeric comparison as the standard. -- \ “Military justice is to justice what military music is to | `\ music.” —Groucho Marx | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
