[Distutils] Is there an official stable release of setuptools?

[Dave Peterson]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 03:44 PM 7/18/2007 -0500, Dave Peterson wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is there a blessed-as-stable, official, release of setuptools?
>> Perhaps it's just me but a version number of the form '0.6c6' or '0.7a1'
>> just doesn't seem like the developers think it is stable yet, even if it
>> is being widely used. :-)
>
> It depends on your definition of "stable", of course.  :)  There will 
> be an 0.6c7, fixing a couple of outstanding issues.  I will then at 
> some point simply bless an 0.6 final, regardless of whether there are 
> any more bugs found, because having an 0.6c8 is just ridiculous.  ;-)

We're in the same boat with some of our components. ;-)


> 0.6c6 is nonetheless an official *release* of setuptools.  We do not 
> have a "stable/unstable" distinction, only a "release/development" 
> distinction.

Okay.  That's good enough for me.  Sounds like we can effectively think
of any non-dev release of setuptools as what I was terming a 'stable'
release.  Perhaps in general we should stop using the term 'stable' and
change it to 'released'?  I'll use that in the rest of this e-mail.


> 0.7a1 has not been released, but 0.6c6 has.  Releases are uploaded to 
> the CheeseShop, and do not have 'dev-r####' tags in their version.
>
>
>> However, there are others who think 'stable' just means that we've
>> found, in our own testing, that things generally work as advertised and
>> that really, our build process is building correctly.  (I may be
>> paraphrasing incorrectly, but since other Enthought-ers read this list,
>> I'll trust them to correct me!)  This would mean that we could put a
>> binary of setuptools 0.7a1 up in our stable repo.
>
> Since 0.7a1 does not exist yet (only unreleased 0.7a1dev-r#### 
> versions), you won't be able to do that just yet.  :)

Yeah, here is where it gets tricky.   Apparently some of us got
overzealous (my term, not theirs) and modified code in *our* component
source (that we now want to 'release') such that it depends on the API
in 0.7a1dev-r####.   We are currently building dev builds of your dev
source such that they have a version specified like
'0.7a1dev-r####.devYYYYMMDDHHMM' which, beyond being quite a mouthful,
distinguishes any of our numerous attempts at building your dev source
from one another.   They each get tagged with the date of the build
since they may be built against the same svn revision.  (Not such a big
deal with setuptools, but the principal is meant for other components
where getting the build right may take several attempts over days or weeks.)

Anyway, when we want to 'release' our component, we want a corresponding
release of the dependency -- but you're not there yet -- so we're
talking about putting out a version called '0.7a1dev-r####' in our
'releases' dir.  This seems to be the only solution given where we are
(besides backing out the implementation that relies on the 0.7a1
features.)   Since people can already get an install of 0.7a1dev-r####
this probably isn't the end of the world, but we are now calling it a
release when you're not -- which bothers me. :-)

I've never had to think like a 'packager' before trying to set this up.
(Thanks for that term by the way Rob!)  Perhaps its time for more
googling of how they do it.

Thanks for your responses!


-- Dave