[Distutils] Numeric-16.0 problem

[Greg Ward]

On 30 August 2000, Paul F. Dubois said:
> OK, I'll fix it. But first convince me this "<" really works though? 
> 0.10 vs. 0.9, for example?

It works, depending on how you define "works".  In the "strict versioning"
scheme, version numbers are dot-separated integer tuples, not floating-point
numbers.  Thus, "0.10" != "0.1", but "0.1.0" == "0.1" (a slight corruption
of the integer-tuple view, made as a concession to reality).

This is the version numbering scheme advocated by the GNU project, and by
ESR's "Software Release Howto".  It works for me, and it's the scheme that
will always be used by the Distutils.  So yes, it's safe to say

    if StrictVersion(distutils.__version__) < "0.9"

...except that I use "0.9.2pre" for pre-release development code, which
makes StrictVersion blow up.  Foo!  I think it's time StrictVersion was
revisited and made a little less strict, since I'm not *quite* such a
version number fascist as I was 18 months ago, when I wrote that code.  ;-)

        Greg