[SciPy-dev] requesting feedback on/editing of scikits wiki-page

[Alexander Schmolck]

David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:

> I found one problem with the approach you mention for versioning: when 
> building a source package from sdist, only the release version part is 
> appended to the source file, whereas with the "scipy approach", if your 
> version is "0.7dev", it is appended to the source package. 

Well, I certainly did mean to have the 0.7dev bit appended to the source
package, too and I thought the setup.cfg entry should take care of that, but
apparently it doesn't.

> Also, having setuptools handling the versioning means it is more difficult
> to get the exact version back from other programs (things shell scripts and
> Makefile, for example), whereas extracting a string from a python file is
> trivial.
>
> I am not sure to understand the advantages of the approach you are 
> proposing ?

None, since it obviously doesn't work properly.

In an ideal world something like this should be triviually handled by the VC
system. In a slightly less ideal world, the standard build tool (setuptools)
should take care of it -- sane version handling certainly doesn't seem to have
anything to do with numpy, but if that's the easiest way to do it for scikits
and you know how to, by all means let's do that and update the wiki-page
accordingly.

Doing it with numpy.distutils actually was my first attempt but it didn't seem
all that simple and easy either, and since I thought it didn't really belong
there anyway, I decided to ask on the distutils-list, where I eventually got
the setuptool-specific info that's currently on the wiki:

  <http://www.mail-archive.com/distutils-sig@python.org/msg03176.html>

I think I've more than exhausted my time budget for this now; if needs be I'll
just hardcode the version numbers for mlabwrap or write a 3 line-script that
does it for me, but it would obviously great if you or someone else could come
up with a better way and document it on the wiki.

If you'd like to use the numpy.distutils approach, in the older wiki-versions
and in the mlabwrap svn there's still an attempt at a fairly generic
version.py file that I thought could get used for all scikits:

  <http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scikits/browser/trunk/mlabwrap/version.py?rev=80>
  (NB. I think the file's location is wrong; version.py really ought to go
  under trunk/mlabwrap/scikits/mlabwrap)

The corresponding setup.py, which tries to use numpy.distutils.Configuration
just for the __svn_version__ file creation:

  <http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scikits/browser/trunk/mlabwrap/setup.py?rev=88>

Otherwise, it would presumably be best if someone asked on the distutils-list
again for clarification.


cheers,

'as