[Freeipa-devel] [freeipa PR#254][comment] Replace LooseVersion with parse_ipa_version()

[mbasti-rh]

  URL: https://github.com/freeipa/freeipa/pull/254
Title: #254: Replace LooseVersion with parse_ipa_version()

mbasti-rh commented:
"""
> > I was thinking about this a bit, and was wondering whether the platform-specific idiosyncracies of the version handling could be safely confined to the platform-specific code. I.E ipaplatform.base would define version comparisons via standard pkg_resources parser and fedora/redhat would override this with their platform-specific quirks.

> Somebody used a time machine and implemented your proposal already. tasks.parse_ipa_version() is a generic version parsing function. On RPM platforms it returns an object that uses librpm.
> 

Yeah, I did.


> IMHO it's ok to use tasks.parse_ipa_version() everywhere.

As Martin said, we have two versions: package released version and API version.

For released package version we need RPM/platform specific parser, but API version is just 2 numbers and standard python function can be used. It is the same accross platforms. 

API version is less important now, because we have versions of commads that scales better, and one day we may drop this overall API version completely. If you want to avoid importing platform then is fine to use standard python functions to compare API versions. Actually that rpmlib scares me.
"""

See the full comment at https://github.com/freeipa/freeipa/pull/254#issuecomment-261610708