2009/6/11 Trent Mick
# My conclusion/opinion
In so far as the proposed new distutils versioning scheme is to be used for enforcing/encouraging versions for packages uploaded to PyPI, I don't believe there is a strong case for including ".devNNN" and certainly not ".postNNN".
- It just isn't used often enough to justify the complexity in the version scheme for packages on PyPI. - Setuptools' facility to do `install_requires = ["OtherProject==dev"]` is a good thing, but this doesn't require the ".devNNNN" and post-release tags on sdist/bdist packages uploaded to PyPI. - The other language repo systems don't demonstrate a need for this. - Pressure on project authors to do normal releases (rather than having a quick "dev sorta-release") when user's want it is a *good thing*. - Dropping this complexity in the version scheme documentation for users would allow us to spend more time educating Python module authors on more important best practices like incrementing the major version number for backward incompatible changes.
+1. That saved me from having to write an email which made this argument, but far less effectively :-) Paul.