More thoughts:

Before I get around to releasing this separately...

• it needs its own docs
• it might be neat to make its own entry_point in setup.py (similar to what https://pypi.org/project/cmp_version/ has)

Hello, I can work on this, we need to create a altogether new repo with pip packaging right?

If at all possible, I'd like to avoid making a separate repo and instead have it packaged from this repo. But it's a moot point as it needs docs before we can even consider that.

Oh, I should explain that avoiding a separate repo is to make maintenance easier for me. Some of that is simple "all my pull requests are in one spot" kind of stuff, but some of it is more political and policy and release processes. I'm currently the bottleneck for cve-bin-tool development, so if a separate repo is the only way to make this happen then I'll close this bug instead of bothering.

Ah, understandable. I did some digging, and there is a way, although it will create some clutter inside the parser package. We can add a setup.py or .toml file for packaging inside the parser package. However, it can get a little too complicated, especially for documentation.
If we want a completely separate document for the parser package (considering Sphinx), we can build the documentation for parser using another library like mkdocs to avoid conflicts with Sphinx. Alternatively, if we are okay with adding it to cve-bin-tool's documentation, then it's quite easy. Please Let me know if it's a go or no-go for my approach.

We can add a setup.py or .toml file for packaging inside the parser package.

@terriko Actually we need to add setup.py outside the parser package/dir and I tried building it and it worked. But the problem is the parser module/dir depends on stuff which is outside of that dir itself for eg.

So they require cve-bin-tool as dependency? So my idea is to add some redundant code in parser module for all these extra dep like utils which are required by some modules inside parser.
And modifiy all imports all modules inside parsers like this so that all parsers work fine with both cve-bin-tool and standalone parser module. Please provide any suggestions if you have any.

if importlib.util.find_spec("cve_bin_tool.parsers"):
    from parsers import Parser
elif importlib.util.find_spec("parsers"):
    from cve_bin_tool.parsers import Parser
else:
    raise ImportError("Neither 'parsers' nor 'cve_bin_tool.parsers' is installed.")

Thanks for the research!

I think you're looking at the wrong part of cve-bin-tool, which is understandable because I used the wrong terminology in this post (I'll change the title and original description in a sec). But I'm interested in releasing the code in version_compare.py as a separate piece, not the stuff in the parsers/ directory. It's considerably more separate and should be easier to do.

Ah got it! that makes the work a lot easier now! Checkout the PR above. And let me know if I am heading in the right direction.