BUG: LooseVersion was used incorrectly

[pallav-fdsi]

closes #8581

Version comparison had a formatting error resulting in "TypeError: expected string or buffer" and preventing Spyder from loading (and probably other issues). Fixed.

[jreback]

can you add a note in v0.15.1 (refing the issue). In what cases would this fail? (e.g. if you have no deps then it bypasses that whole try,except), but when would it hit that error?

[pallav-fdsi]

Not sure if you mean just leave a comment here? -- I found the issue when the offending code prevented Spyder from launching after I installed the Google Python API. It was also causing the pandas library to think that the API could not be imported, or an error when one wrote "from pandas.io import gbq"

[jreback]

this is not very well tested (really hard as we don't have an authentication setup). Just trying to see if only having some deps caused this to fail.

[jreback]

merged via 403f38d
thanks!

[jacobschaer]

I'll see about rerunning the integration tests this coming weekend.

[jacobschaer]

I'm having some permissions issues with our Bigquery automated test suite. However, as with #8590 it seems that gbq's test_requirements() method is failing if the user has bigquery installed (which is a requirement for the automated tests of gbq).

__main__.test_requirements ... SKIP: pandas requires google-api-python-client >= 1.2.0 for Google BigQuery support, current version 1.2

Of course, this may be unrelated to this patch - just thought I'd mention it. It looks like this can be resolved by simply correcting the test_imports() method:

           if LooseVersion(_GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION) >= '1.2':
                _GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VALID_VERSION = True

I'm not sure what the consequences of doing this are though...