[Distutils] Differences in PEP386 and setuptools

[Erik Bray]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.bray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Donald Stufft <donald.stufft at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>
>> Note that this was an intentional difference with setuptools.
>>
>> Do you have any idea _why_? It seems from my perspective (of someone
>> who wasn't really paying attention back then) to be a fairly arbitrary
>> difference
>> in both prior art and what I've personally seen as the common usage that has
>> a good chance of causing confusion (as it already has).
>>
>
> My guess--and this is pure speculation as I wasn't following the
> original discussions either--is that it fell out of the desire to
> require versions to be lexicographically ordered.  So "dev" would
> *have* to come after "a", "b", and "c" whether we like it or not.  But
> at some point the convention to use ".dev" was proposed, which solves
> this issue--this puts it before "a" lexicographically and thus makes
> more sense in general.  Although ".dev" made it into PEP 386 it seems
> the rest of the PEP wasn't changed to reflect the fact that ".dev" now
> comes first.
>
> Again--just speculation.  But I don't see any way that the PEP as
> written makes sense without assuming some kind of editorial oversight.

I should add: I'm not saying that this scheme actually *does* allow
versions to be lexicographically ordered.  For example, "0.1.dev" >
"0.1.1" which is certainly not desired.  I'm just guessing that
somebody was trying to tweak the scheme so that it would work this
way.

Erik