Feel free to adopt whatever you think is the "best" practice: I don't understand what's wrong with 1.1.99 instead the "magic" 1.2b2. I followed these "lengthy discussions" .. if an agreement was found and was technically sound why do you think people still arguing about that? And we're talking years not hours to come up with those peps. I like a joke from time to time: python -c 'print "1.2.dev1" < "1.2.1"' -> False Even easier in my unicors populated universe. I'll simply ignore anything about those peps, for what it matters. On Wed 06/02/13 17:01, "Erik Bray" erik.m.bray@gmail.com wrote:

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Donald Stufft wrote: On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 10:49 AM, a.cav allo@cavallinux.eu wrote:

...

Or until when somebody will explain if X.Y.devN comes before of after X.Y.N...

Easy, before.

Which is explained in the PEP pretty clearly I thought. But if you're still not sure there were lengthy discussions on this very mailing list that led to that decision. For what it's worth, there were people who argued the opposite too, but eventually it seems like a consensus was reached.