[Distutils] Comparison semantics for alphanumeric components of a version number (was: Version comparison - round 2)

[Paul Moore]

2009/6/5 Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>:
>> But I acknowledge that I have no personal requirement for any of this,
>> so the only interest I have is an aesthetic one of *not* seeing
>> overcomplicated, difficult to understand, specifications become part
>> of the Python stdlib.
>
> Well if the specification is difficult to understand or overcomplicated
> it'll fail for sure.
>
> But so far, besides that very specific case for the post-release dev
> tag, I don't find
> it complicated at all. Another win I can see is that it will help developers use
> better versions numbers for their projects imho.

And yet, in spite of repeated requests for specific examples of
projects using this post-dev stuff, which haven't been forthcoming,
why is nobody saying "it's an unnecessary complication, we'll drop
it"?

OK, I'll say it: Having post and dev specifications is unnecessary.
Please remove it from the spec.

As an alternative, allow a trailing '-' followed by arbitrary
alphanumeric (a-zA-Z0-9) data. If this is all numeric, sort as
numbers, otherwise sort textually. Numeric vs non-numeric is sorted as
text. That covers

  -vendorid (as used by such things as cygwin, RPMs, etc - 1.2.1-3)
  -revision (e.g. subversion revision numbers 1.2-32471)
  -changeset (e.g. DVCS changeset id 1.3-0c30df5c527b)
  ... and anything else people want to invent (dates, developer's age, ...)

I repeat - I don't have any experience in this area. But surely the
people who do should be able to explain to me *why* they need
something more complex than this?

(Note: I'm assuming that the point of setting a standard is that
people move to it - arguments like "Project XXX uses version numbers
like so" don't count unless there's a justification why switching
version numbering format isn't an option when they are planning to
switch version parsing code in the first place!)

Or I'm completely confused. (But I don't seem to be the only one).

Paul.