Extract methods from VersionParser.php into it's own package

[nickvergessen]

Composer\Package\Version\VersionParser has some good methods dealing with versions which would be nice to have in a seperate project, so they can be reused instead of either copy pasting them or relying on the whole composer package.

This especially applies to the following methods:

• parseStability()
• normalizeStability()
• normalize()
• normalizeBranch()
• manipulateVersionString()
• expandStability()
• parseNameVersionPairs()

[alcohol]

I had a look at this, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. The Composer\Package\Version\ namespace contains a lot of functions that depend on other namespaces (most of them also within Composer\Package\).

It would require quite some refactoring to cleanly separate it.

[lavoiesl]

I often have to include the whole Composer project to be able to manipulate package information, including json and versions. Perhaps a composer/schema project would be useful.

[legoktm]

+1

I'm specifically interested in doing this for MediaWiki, where we would like to re-use composer's version parsing code instead of writing our own. I think we would want to include VersionParser and all the classes implementing LinkConstraintInterface.

VersionParser currently depends on other parts of composer outside of LinkConstraintInterface in:

• parseConstraints - BasePackage::$stabilities
• parseConstraint - BasePackage::$stabilities
• parseLinks - returns Link's
• formatVersion - uses PackageInterface

I don't think it would be too difficult to move those methods somewhere else, and I would be willing to work on a patch that did that.

[legoktm]

• parseConstraints - BasePackage::$stabilities - Don't use BasePackage::$stabilities in VersionParser #4213
• parseConstraint - BasePackage::$stabilities - Don't use BasePackage::$stabilities in VersionParser #4213
• parseLinks - returns Link's - Move VersionParser::parseLinks() to ArrayLoader::parseLinks() #4214
• formatVersion - uses PackageInterface Move VersionParser::formatVersion() to BasePackage::getFullPrettyVersion() #4086

[legoktm]

I think we can close this now that https://github.com/composer/semver exists :)

[Seldaek]

https://github.com/composer/semver