[Distutils] [RFC] PEP 345 and PEP 386 updates

[David Cournapeau]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> We said earlier that we could use sys.hexversion to handle this, but otherwise,
> at least for the Python version, we can use the StrictVersion() class
> from Distutils,
>
> *But* we ended up thinking that it would be better for the first version to keep
> just "==", "!=", "in" and "not in" operators and a MAJOR.MINOR string.
>
> These are enough just to compare strings, on a limited number of
> versions for Python.
>
> What use case you have in mind for a three numbers version ?

Although it is best to avoid depending on micro number, one recent
use-case I can think about is the added MSVC runtime information at
python level (between python 2.6.1 and 2.6.2), which we use in numpy to
make sure we link the exact same C runtime as python.

David