[Distutils] dev versions

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Thursday,2009-10-08, at 15:41 , Ian Bicking wrote:

> So after creating, say, version 0.3.1, I always mark a package as  
> 0.3.2dev.  But this is annoying, you might never create a version  
> 0.3.2 (e.g., 0.4 might be the next level).
>
> So, it would be better to use something like 0.3.1~dev.  What is  
> considered best practice for this?  Ideally something that works  
> with both Setuptools and the upcoming Distribute version spec.

What we do in the Tahoe-LAFS project is we don't count down to a  
future version, we only count up from a past version.  This is also  
what Twisted does (no coincidence -- we probably got the idea from  
them).

So the most recent release of Tahoe-LAFS was 1.5.0.  The next time we  
committed a patch to our darcs repository, it automatically got the  
version number 1.5.0-r4040.  (The automation to do this is our own  
implementation -- darcsver [1], but it produces the same kind of  
output as setuptools's builtin svn integration and Twisted's own svn  
integration does.)

The current snapshot build of Tahoe-LAFS is numbered 1.5.0-r4073, and  
eventually we will have one numbered something like 1.5.0-r4123, and  
then the very next version will be 1.6.0.  The next version after  
that will be 1.6.0-r4125.

This means that we don't have version numbers with things like "beta"  
in their name.  The most recent time that we had a beta was, I think,  
Tahoe-LAFS 1.4.1-r4021.  We just announced on our mailing list "Hey  
everybody, we're ready to make a new release!  Please try the current  
version (1.4.1-r4021) and tell us if it works for you!".

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/darcsver