Hello Pythonistas,
today, I've looked up packages in rawhide providing python3dist(...) = 0 and I opened bugzillas for them:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=python3dist0
While version 0 (or equal versions like 0.0 or 0.0.0) is probably technically valid, it most certainly indicates a packaging error (most likely but not necessarily a downstream packaging error).
Should we prevent this error from happening by explicitly erroring (and failing the build) when it happens? I think it would make the dependency generators more robust.
In an unlikely scenario when packagers actually want to package version 0, they can reach out and we can allow it via some configuration (but [YAGNI], so I don't want to clutter the generator with yet another option right away).
[YAGNI] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it