verlib2 26.2


pip install verlib2

  Latest version

Released: Jul 08, 2026

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Author: Donald Stufft
Maintainer: Andreas Motl
Requires Python: >=3.6

Classifiers

Development Status
  • 5 - Production/Stable

Intended Audience
  • Developers
  • Information Technology
  • System Administrators

Programming Language
  • Python
  • Python :: 3 :: Only
  • Python :: 3.6
  • Python :: 3.7
  • Python :: 3.8
  • Python :: 3.9
  • Python :: 3.10
  • Python :: 3.11
  • Python :: 3.12
  • Python :: 3.13
  • Python :: 3.14
  • Python :: 3.15
  • Python :: Free Threading
  • Python :: Implementation :: CPython
  • Python :: Implementation :: PyPy

Topic
  • Software Development :: Build Tools
  • Software Development :: Libraries
  • Software Development :: Quality Assurance
  • Software Development :: Testing

Typing
  • Typed

verlib2

Tests Test coverage Python versions

License Status PyPI Downloads

» Changelog | PyPI | Issues | Source code | License

About

A standalone bundle of distutils.version and packaging.version, without anything else.

verlib and Distutils are the implementations of PEP 386. packaging.version is the implementation of PEP 440. verlib2 bundles both of them into a standalone package.

To retain backward compatibility with earlier versions of Python, syntax features like PEP 570 have been removed from the original code.

Rationale

Everyone needs to compare versions, but no one wants to add packaging as a dependency. distutils is deprecated, and Python 3.12 removed it from the standard library.

Following PEP 632 to leave distutils behind, we found that people started bundling pep440.py files into their projects, causing some redundancy across the board.

Setup

pip install verlib2

Usage

from verlib2 import Version

assert Version("1.0.dev456") < Version("1!1.2.rev33+123456") 

Note: The verlib2.Version symbol links to verlib2.packaging.version, effectively providing packaging's Version class as the default variant. Both implementations can be accessed like this:

from verlib2.distutils.version import LooseVersion, StrictVersion
from verlib2.packaging.version import Version

Versioning

The version numbering of verlib2 follows that of the packaging package, because most changes to verlib2.packaging.version are mirroring corresponding updates to packaging.version.

Acknowledgements

Alyssa Coghlan, Andrew Kuchling, Donald Stufft, Greg Stein, Greg Ward, Tarek Ziadé, and all contributors to PEP-0386, PEP-0440 and their predecessors, including other members of the Python Distutils-SIG and authors and contributors to the distutilsversion, verlib, distutils, distutils2, packaging.version packages.

Other projects

Notable other projects are pep440-rs and pep440-version-utils if you need better speed or more features. The former implements PEP440 in Rust, and the latter makes it easier to handle version bumps, also following the PEP440 specification. Both packages require Python 3.8 and higher.

Prior Art

We had a look at the pep440, pep440deb, pep440nz, pep440-utility, and version-utils, but apparently, they did not include what we have been looking for.

Development

Set up package in development mode.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --editable='.[develop,test]'

Run software tests.

poe check

Supported by

JetBrains logo.

Special thanks to the people at JetBrains s.r.o. for supporting us with excellent development tooling.

Wheel compatibility matrix

Platform Python 3
any

Files in release

Extras:
Dependencies:
importlib-metadata
typing-extensions