| 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> |
| |