[Distutils] Differences in PEP386 and setuptools

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 03:09:19PM -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> I've been comparing how PEP386/distutils2.version treats versions
> and how pkg_resources from setuptools treats versions and it
> confirmed a worry of me with the way that dev is treated in PEP386.
> 
> In PEP386 you have several kinds of "top level" releases, these 
> are alpha, beta, candidate, and final and they are sorted as you
> would expect. On top of that it has pre and post releases for
> any of those top level releases. The pre releases are tagged
> with a ".dev" and post releases are tagged with a ".post". They
> are sorted immediately before/after the "main" release that they
> are pre/post for.
> 
> In pkg_resources dev is treated as it's own "main" release and
> sorts it in front of an alpha.
> 
> This means that given the versions:
> 
>     ["0.1.dev1", "0.1a1", "0.1b1", "0.1c1", "0.1"]
> 
> PEP386 will sort them as:
>     
>     ["0.1a1", "0.1b1", "0.1c1", "0.1.dev1", "0.1"]
> 
> and pkg_resources will sort them as:
> 
>     ["0.1.dev1", "0.1a1", "0.1b1", "0.1c1", "0.1"]
> 
> 
> To further complicate things the most common usage I've personally seen
> in the wild is that of "0.1dev" or "0.1dev1" which the author expects to sort
> before an alpha (In this case distutils2.version throws an error, but the
> suggest
> function is able to turn it into 0.1.dev1).
> 
> I think this difference is going to cause confusion, especially during the the
> transition period when you're going to have people using both pkg_resources
> and the new PEP386 functions.
> 
> Since PEP386 is only in the "Accepted" stage, and isn't part of the official
> implementation yet, is it at all possible to revise it? Ideally I think to
> follow
> with the prior art, and people's expectations "dev" should be moved to a "main"
> release type sorted before an alpha, and to take it's place as a pre release
> modifier
> perhaps something like "pre" can be used instead (e.g. "0.1.pre1").

Note that this was an intentional difference with setuptools.

-Toshio
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