[Distutils] easy_install should consider the development status of packages

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

currently, lxml has both a stable release series (1.3.x) and an unstable alpha
release series (2.0alphaX) on PyPI. When you "easy_install lxml", you get the
2.0alpha version. I don't think that's what users expect and it's definitely
not what most users want, but at the same time I would like to keep 2.0
visible and easy_install-able to make people aware of it and to let them
decide by themselves.

I would like to have easy_install changed to either consider the Trove
development status of a package and prefer the highest one (or at least those
from 5 up), and/or to check the version string for the typical alpha/beta
substrings and ignore them by default. It would then be easy to add a command
line option like "--unstable" for those who know better.

Any comments on that?

Stefan