Providing pytz version in setup.py requirements

Question

The problem

I wanted to include requirement for pytz in setup.py script in my library, but wanted also to set the minimal version required. But the version numbers used by pytz module (eg. " 2012f ") seem to be incompatible with what distutils wants to be provided (eg. " 1.1.3 ").

Is there any way to include requirement for specific version of pytz (eg. >=2012f ) without altering pytz or distutils ?

Details

To do that I did something like that in setup.py file:

setup(
    # ... basic data here ...
    requires=[
        'pytz (>=2012f)',
    ],
    # ... some other data here ...
)

But when I was doing sudo python setup.py install , the following error appeared:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 25, in <module>
    long_description=long_description,
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/core.py", line 112, in setup
    _setup_distribution = dist = klass(attrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py", line 259, in __init__
    getattr(self.metadata, "set_" + key)(val)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py", line 1220, in set_requires
    distutils.versionpredicate.VersionPredicate(v)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/versionpredicate.py", line 115, in __init__
    self.pred = [splitUp(aPred) for aPred in str.split(",")]
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/versionpredicate.py", line 25, in splitUp
    return (comp, distutils.version.StrictVersion(verStr))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/version.py", line 40, in __init__
    self.parse(vstring)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/version.py", line 107, in parse
    raise ValueError, "invalid version number '%s'" % vstring
ValueError: invalid version number '2012f'

Seemingly the issue is caused by distutils trying to match this regular expression:

version_re = re.compile(r'^(\d+) \. (\d+) (\. (\d+))? ([ab](\d+))?$',
                        re.VERBOSE)

and when it does not match, the above error is raised.

I have seen people altering the source code of pytz (to change the version into something more like 2012.6 ), but it looks like extremely bad idea to me. I hope there is another way that I missed.

Changing pytz (>=2012f) into pytz works, but it then does not limit the requirement to specific version of pytz module.

Answer 1

Using install_requires setuptools option :

setup(
    # ... basic data here ...
    install_requires='pytz>=2012f', # distutils ignores it with a warning, pip uses it
    # ... some other data here ...
)