[Distutils] A tale of two conventions: Incompatibility of version comparison semantics (was: version scheme: a case for dropping ".devNNN" and ".postNNN")

[Ben Finney]

Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> writes:

> -1:  "practicality beats purity" here:  there is *no* case in which an
> alpha version should *ever* sort after the final release with the
> corresponding number.  If we specify the "simple pure" scheme you
> propose, nobody will use it, period.

Well then, I don't see a way forward on the issue of helping
distributors to manage version numbers sanely. I don't know of any
operating system package manager that returns different comparison
results depending on what specific letters are used in the version
string.

All this specialness-of-certain-letters may make sense to Python core
developers, but it's just going to result in nonsensical version
progressions as far as operating system distributors are concerned. What
will be the resolution there?

-- 
 \         “Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?” “I think so, |
  `\     Brain, but me and Pippi Longstocking — I mean, what would the |
_o__)                      children look like?” —_Pinky and The Brain_ |
Ben Finney
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