[Distutils] version for VCS/local builds between alpha and release

[Joost Molenaar]

On 14 April 2015 at 10:04, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:

> The basic scenario here is developers and CD deployers building
> versions from VCS of arbitrary commits. So we need to be able to
> deliver strictly increasing version numbers, automatically, without
> interfering with actual publishing of pre-release and release versions
> to PyPI.

I think the advice in PEP440 about using dev tags[1] is a little misguided,
because dev tags count towards a known version in the future, while DVCS tags
(at least in Git) count the number of commits since a known version in the
past. In this respect, 'git describe' most closely resembles the post release
tags in PEP440, so that's what I've chosen to use in my build scripts, in spite
of the recommendations in PEP440.


[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#dvcs-based-version-labels

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Joost Molenaar