[Distutils] Common version-comparison semantics for peace love and harmony

[Eric Smith]

Ben Finney wrote:
> Yes, and others that have been proposed to be exceptions to alphanumeric
> ordering.
> 
>> the problem we have is to be able to sort those post and pre releases
>> with other versions. And this is not possible with a simple
>> alphanumerical comparison.
> 
> It is, if the version strings are chosen to fit within such a comparison
> semantic.
> 
>> And this is not a special use case, and has to be part imho of our
>> version-comparison semantics.
>> otherwise, our scheme would be useless for developers that work as a
>> daily basis with snapshots,
>> dev versions etc.
> 
> This is a red herring, AFAICT. It's been discussed already that workflow
> is orthogonal to version comparison semantics. That is, nothing about a
> workflow involving snapshots or dev versions etc. implies that
> exceptional version keywords need to be accommodated. Exactly the same
> workflow can take place by choosing different version strings that work
> with existing version-comparison semantics.

How would you propose Python itself (a project that doesn't have 
especially wacky release numbers) specify 3.1.1rc1 in such a scheme?