[Distutils] version scheme: a case for dropping ".devNNN" and ".postNNN"

[P.J. Eby]

At 06:01 PM 6/11/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>2009/6/11 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> >> > Dev tags are so that while you're
> >> > doing development, your locally-installed versions can be distinguished
> >> > from one another.
> >>
> >> Distinguished by what? What code (that you didn't write yourself,
> >> purely for internal use) needs to parse your dev tag?
> >
> > Distinguished by setuptools for processing version requirements of scripts,
> > or require() statements in code, and installation requirements of
> > newly-installed code.
>
>So will setuptools be modified to use the new code?

It doesn't have to be; the RationalVersion scheme is both a strict 
subset of setuptools' scheme, and also has the property that most 
in-field uses of setuptools-based versioning schemes can be 
*mechanically* translated to RationalVersion instances, using an 
appropriate implementation of suggest_version().

This means that if somebody chooses to adopt RationalVersion (as 
currently defined in the PEP), setuptools will read and process it as 
correctly as it does more exotic numbering schemes.

IOW, setuptools doesn't need to be changed, unless it was to say, add 
warnings for non-convertible versions...  and that could actually be 
done with a plugin.