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author | Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> | 1997-12-23 18:43:55 (GMT) |
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committer | Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> | 1997-12-23 18:43:55 (GMT) |
commit | 5291037c704a0e092313b70fa09364296e3149fa (patch) | |
tree | 4eaf8bc2858903c36ab3a0457412358466ef6b2e /Tools/versioncheck/README | |
parent | 7f96291ee28ead21ab79b2f21a2dc14ca384c316 (diff) | |
download | cpython-5291037c704a0e092313b70fa09364296e3149fa.zip cpython-5291037c704a0e092313b70fa09364296e3149fa.tar.gz cpython-5291037c704a0e092313b70fa09364296e3149fa.tar.bz2 |
Adding Jack Jansen's version checking utility.
Diffstat (limited to 'Tools/versioncheck/README')
-rw-r--r-- | Tools/versioncheck/README | 41 |
1 files changed, 41 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Tools/versioncheck/README b/Tools/versioncheck/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a51411b --- /dev/null +++ b/Tools/versioncheck/README @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +This is versioncheck 1.0, a first stab at automatic checking of versions of +Python extension packages installed on your system. + +The basic idea is that each package contains a _checkversion.py +somewhere, probably at the root level of the package. In addition, each +package maintainer makes a file available on the net, through ftp or +http, which contains the version number of the most recent distribution +and some readable text explaining the differences with previous +versions, where to download the package, etc. + +The checkversions.py script walks through the installed Python tree (or +through a tree of choice), and runs each _checkversion.py script. These +scripts retrieve the current-version file over the net, compares version +numbers and tells the user about new versions of packages available. + +A boilerplate for the _checkversion.py file can be found here. Replace +package name, version and the URL of the version-check file and put it in +your distribution. In stead of a single URL you can also specify a list +of URLs. Each of these will be checked in order until one is available, +this is handy for distributions that live in multiple places. Put the +primary distribution site (the most up-to-date site) before others. +The script is executed with execfile(), not imported, and the current +directory is the checkversion directory, so be careful with globals, +importing, etc. + +The version-check file consists of an rfc822-style header followed by +plaintext. The only header field checked currently is +'Current-Version:', which should contain te current version and is +matched against the string contained in the _checkversion.py script. +The rest of the file is human-readable text and presented to the user if +there is a version mismatch. It should contain at the very least a URL +of either the current distribution or a webpage describing it. + +Pycheckversion.py is the module that does the actual checking of versions. +It should be fine where it is, it is imported by checkversion before anything +else is done, but if imports fail you may want to move it to somewhere +along sys.path. + + Jack Jansen, CWI, 23-Dec-97. + <jack@cwi.nl> + |