[Distutils] Differences in PEP386 and setuptools

[Chris McDonough]

On Thu, 2012-09-27 at 16:15 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 05:00:56PM -0500, Brad Allen wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > 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 :-)
> > 
> > Why is this perceived as a bikeshed issue? It seems like a discussion
> > about substantial functionality which is tied to the semantics of these
> > special tags. For many projects and organizations, terms like 'alpha'
> > and 'beta' and 'dev' have meaning in a release context, and rearranging
> > the order of these concepts has an impact.
> > 
> dev has no universal defined relation to alpha, beta, etc in a release
> context.

The tools that people use to install a Python package sort it before
alpha and have for many years.  That seems to be a pretty good argument
in favor, all other things considered.

- C