[Distutils] PEP386 Pre releases

[Erik Bray]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Donald Stufft <donald.stufft at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why does 1.0a1 sort before 1.0.dev1? It appears to me that common
> usage in the wild of dev1 releases is that they are used for the
> development version before any sort of alpha, beta, rc, or final has
> been cut?

If I had to guess, the rationale might be that when developing a new
version you're developing toward the first "alpha" release, so
something like .dev1 would be a development preview of a final release
after all a/b/rc pre-releases have been released.

That said, this doesn't match my workflow at all.  After releasing
"1.0" the next version is going to be "1.1", and any development
pre-release will be "1.1.devX".  "1.1a" might not ever even exist.  I
think others brought up this critique at the time PEP 386 was being
discussed, but then nothing was ever done about it >_>

Erik