[Distutils] Differences in PEP386 and setuptools

[Erik Bray]

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.

Erik