[Question] version validate should be more strict?

To assist reproducing bugs, please include the following:

Summary of the h5py configuration
---------------------------------

h5py    2.10.0
HDF5    1.10.6
Python  3.6.8 (default, Jan 14 2019, 11:02:34)
[GCC 8.0.1 20180414 (experimental) [trunk revision 259383]]
sys.platform    linux
sys.maxsize     9223372036854775807
numpy   1.18.0

when we run python setup.py configure --hdf5-version=X.Y.Z, we should be a little more strict with the version string, thus to say, the version number should be non-negtive: https://github.com/h5py/h5py/blob/2caa3d8d5a221b47aa654db2adabe4417634e5cb/setup_configure.py#L42-L49

I think maybe we can change it like this:

 def validate_version(s): 
     """ Ensure that s contains an X.Y.Z format version string, or ValueError. 
     """ 
     try: 
         tpl = tuple(int(x) for x in s.split('.')) 
         for e in tpl:
             if len(tpl) != 3 or e < 0: raise ValueError 
     except Exception: 
         raise ValueError("HDF5 version string must be in X.Y.Z format") 

@takluyver what do you think?

[takluyver]

That’s kind of what I’m thinking, but I’m not 100% sure - maybe there’s some scenario I haven’t thought of where it is useful to manually override the auto-detected HDF5 version, or where it can find HDF5 to build but can’t get the version number for some reason.

[takluyver]

That could be. I guess that most of us maintaining it are using Linux/Mac, so anything Windows specific may not get much attention.

I also wonder: is it possible to get the HDF5 version number from the header files while compiling? I’m not well up on C stuff, but maybe it’s possible to drop the ctypes version detection thing that way.