I am wondering if we shouldn't put this directly in repo.py, what do you think?
Also, it seems this will work, but I've grown fond of using distutils.version.LooseVersion(...) for comparisons like this.
distutils.version.LooseVersion(...)
@pingou, maybe we should just merge this and fix it to our liking post-facto.
Ok, I'm merging this manually (to avoid the merge commit) and will adjust it post-facto as suggested by @ralph.