[Distutils] Version numbers for module distributions

[Greg Ward]

Quoth Andrew M. Kuchling, on 10 December 1998:
> 	Disagreement; I'd vote for mechanism, not policy.  For
> example, recently I went through 3 pre-releases of xml-0.5; they could
> have been called 0.5a{1,2,3}.  ILU's been at 2.0a{1-12}, and I have no
> idea if the developers ever plan to go to beta.  Different developers
> use version numbers differently, in ways that are consistent in the
> large but inconsistent in small details.  

Module developers are perfectly free to use illogical version numbers if
they wish.  I certainly don't intend to enforce through code the version
number *guidelines* that I proposed, nor do I intend to check for the
version numbers occupying the "illogical" subsets of
version-number-space.  I just wanted to point out the possible
consequences of *that particular* set of guidelines.  If anyone has
suggestions for version number guidelines that don't have unexpected
consequences, I'd like to hear 'em.

(Of course, such guidelines should be short, simple, and obvious.
That's what I like about my proposal.)

> 	A side note: for the XML package, I think things are getting
> to the point that I want to create a fake build tree (the blib/ idea)
> in order to allow running the test suite without having to actually
> perform the installation.  So, is there any implementation work that
> can be done?

Yeah, the distutils.build module.  It would have to be told various
lists of source files (for a start: .py, ancillary .c files, and
extension .c files) and then would Do The Right Thing: copy .py into
blib, compile to .py and .po, compile all .c files, and link ancillary
.o with extension .o to make .so.  (Platform independence can come
later.)

Of course, we haven't really looked at the existing extension-building
systems, e.g. the interface put on the table by John Skaller.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
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