Bug#1004746: lintian: provide a check for Python package version numbers validity

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 07:57:58PM +0500, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 02:45:21PM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > I just hit two packages which gave me the following warning when
> > pkg_resources tried to load them:
> > 
> > /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py:116: PkgResourcesDeprecationWarning: 1.12.1-git20200711.33e2d80-dfsg1-0.6 is an invalid version and will not be supported in a future release
> >   warnings.warn(
> This looks strange to me. I wouldn't expect the package version
> (especially with the Debian part) to be there.
> I see flatbuffers runs `VERSION=$(DEB_VERSION) python$$pv setup.py build`,
> I don't know why, or whether this is a good idea.

Some updates on this:

* The version information can also appear in
  /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/*.dist-info/METADATA
* The upstream standard is defined in PEP 440:
  https://peps.python.org/pep-0440/

I agree, flatbuffers is doing weird stuff.

Best wishes,

   Julian