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

[P.J. Eby]

At 08:22 AM 6/12/2009 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>"P.J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> writes: > Dev tags are so that 
>while you're doing development, your > locally-installed versions 
>can be distinguished from one another. How is “distinguished from 
>one another” different from “compare sequentially previous or 
>subsequent to one another”?

First, more than one version can co-exist in .egg form, and there may 
be a need to depend on an exact version.  Second, as already shown in 
other examples, there is a need for the installed development version 
to be compared against a desired development version, and these 
requirements are expressed by version comparison strings.


>  What is wrong with using the version comparison semantics without 
> special-cased words for this purpose?

Please explain how you intend to designate "development" versions 
that compare less than the equivalent non-development versions in your scheme.