Versioneer reported version of dev build is incorrect

[jcrist]

Sometimes it's nice to install projects from master to get recent fixes (e.g. pip install git+https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas.git). However, since pandas switched to using dev branches for 0.19.1+, versioneer incorrectly reports the version of the dev build as 0.19.0. This breaks checks for version, e.g. the following would report false for a build off master, when semantically master is after the 0.19.2 release:

from distutils.version import LooseVersion
import pandas as pd

LooseVersion(pd.__version__) > '0.19.2'

I'm not sure if there is an easy/good fix for this, just opening this to discuss.

[jorisvandenbossche]

@jcrist When installed with pip from github directly, does it give you 0.19.0 or 0.19.0-n-hash?

[jcrist]

0.19.0+n-hash. Same as building it from source normally:

(pandas) jcrist ~ $ pip install git+https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas.git
Collecting git+https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas.git
  Cloning https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas.git to /var/folders/vl/xj_l5ml95sbfm7x480g60x440000gp/T/pip-jRkfFH-build
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): python-dateutil in ./anaconda/envs/pandas/lib/python2.7/site-packages/python_dateutil-2.5.3-py2.7.egg (from pandas==0.19.0+343.g8e13da2)
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pytz>=2011k in ./anaconda/envs/pandas/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pytz-2016.6.1-py2.7.egg (from pandas==0.19.0+343.g8e13da2)
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): numpy>=1.7.0 in ./anaconda/envs/pandas/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from pandas==0.19.0+343.g8e13da2)
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): six>=1.5 in ./anaconda/envs/pandas/lib/python2.7/site-packages/six-1.10.0-py2.7.egg (from python-dateutil->pandas==0.19.0+343.g8e13da2)
Installing collected packages: pandas
  Running setup.py install for pandas ... done
Successfully installed pandas-0.19.0+343.g8e13da2
You are using pip version 8.1.2, however version 9.0.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
(pandas) jcrist ~ $ python -c "import pandas;print(pandas.__version__)"
0.19.0+343.g8e13da2

Versioneer just grabs the version from git describe --tags --dirty --always --long:

(pandas) jcrist pandas $ git describe --tags --dirty --always --long
v0.19.0-343-g8e13da2

[jreback]

we don't have a concept of minor release detection anymore, as the master branch (ATM) is all encompasing, from >= 0.19.0 till now. So detection of something that started existing only in 0.19.2 is theoretically impossible via the tags, though obviously via duck typing it is.

So solutions are:

• use a specific commit counter in LooseVersion
• tag master at the same time as we tag 0.19.x with a (non-annotated?) tag that 'marks' it, e.g. v0.19.2_released or something
• duck type for the features that are specifically needed

[jorisvandenbossche]

Another option would be to tag master with eg 0.20.0.dev after branching 0.19.x.

In that case a check like " >= 0.19.2" would work for both master and 0.19.2 (but of course is only correct if your master is up to date)

[jreback]

closing