Ben Finney wrote:
Yes, and others that have been proposed to be exceptions to alphanumeric ordering.
the problem we have is to be able to sort those post and pre releases with other versions. And this is not possible with a simple alphanumerical comparison.
It is, if the version strings are chosen to fit within such a comparison semantic.
And this is not a special use case, and has to be part imho of our version-comparison semantics. otherwise, our scheme would be useless for developers that work as a daily basis with snapshots, dev versions etc.
This is a red herring, AFAICT. It's been discussed already that workflow is orthogonal to version comparison semantics. That is, nothing about a workflow involving snapshots or dev versions etc. implies that exceptional version keywords need to be accommodated. Exactly the same workflow can take place by choosing different version strings that work with existing version-comparison semantics.
How would you propose Python itself (a project that doesn't have especially wacky release numbers) specify 3.1.1rc1 in such a scheme?