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authorGuido van Rossum <guido@python.org>1997-12-23 18:43:55 (GMT)
committerGuido van Rossum <guido@python.org>1997-12-23 18:43:55 (GMT)
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Adding Jack Jansen's version checking utility.
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+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>
+