On Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Erik Bray wrote: > 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. > If that's the reason (and I wasn't around during the original discussions) then that's already been broken by rc/final (final is given an internal representation of `z` to allow ordering to work.
The way the PEP is written .devN is a pre-release of a specific version (a version being a numbered release of either alpha, beta, candidate, or final). While I think pre-releases of a specific version is likely useful in some context, I think that it should be using an identifier more like `pre`. Using the `dev` tag to me violates what a user expects from history. I'm not discounting that there is a reason that makes sense though, hopefully if there is one someone will be able to come forth with it. I personally feel though that the current behavior is unexpected, will cause confusion as long as releases are being ordered by both pkg_resources and PEP386, and goes against common usage of the release tags. My proposal would be to replace the .devN pre-release tag with .preN, and add a `devN` tag (perhaps optional N, with an omitted N being equal to `dev0`. I feel like this will fit into people's expectations better, and make migration easier.
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