How to raise an exception on the version number of a module

Question

How can you raise an exception when you import a module that is less or greater than a given value for its __version__?

There are a lot of different ways you could do it, but I feel like there must be some really simple way that eludes me at the moment. In this case the version number is of the format x.x.x

Answer 1

Python comes with this inbuilt as part of distutils. The module is called distutils.version and is able to compare several different version number formats.

from distutils.version import StrictVersion

print StrictVersion('1.2.2') > StrictVersion('1.2.1')

For way more information than you need, see the documentation:

>>> import distutils.version
>>> help(distutils.version)