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> | |