[Distutils] Differences in PEP386 and setuptools

[Donald Stufft]

On Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> then that works perfectly fine for me. To put out a snapshot between rc and
> final, I'd do 0.2rc1.post1 so not having a pre/dev in there doesn't bother
> me.
> 
> However, now that you mention it, ISTR that this is the way that it was
> originally and the lack of pre/dev in that position did bother another (set
> of?) the PEP authors enough that it was changed. For me, switching the
> search order of that particular piece is a bikeshed so I seem to have
> reallocated the memory for storing the arguments made in favor of shifting
> it to the current position :-)

So I guess the question is does losing the ability to not have a dev that
is sorted between the rc and the final outweigh the legacy concerns of
dealing with the number of packages in the wild (which is hard to count
since due to other issues very few non final releases make it to PyPI) that
expect 0.1dev1 to sort before an alpha.

Personally I would want to fall on the side of not breaking the current assumptions
since given a particular version string we do not have a good way of determining
if it's expecting dev to fall before alpha or expecting it to fall after the rc.

I should note that I originally stumbled upon this issue working on trying to convert
existing tools to use PEP386 and warn when a version wasn't PEP386 compat and
the difference between the way PEP386 handles the ordering and the way pkg_resources
handled the differences caused a problem with a different version getting installed before
and after my changes that caused me to dig into why.
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