Questions on PEP 440 - Version Identification and Dependency Specification

[Ryan Holmes]

Greetings all,

I currently follow PEP 440 as it relates to my application. Right now we follow a x.y.z scheme, with y incrementing with our normal releases, z incrementing for any bug fixes for that release, and x not really incrementing unless something major happens (for example, our conversion from python 2 to 3)

Our current release is v2.3.1. For the past several weeks, I've been working on a significant overhaul to one of our systems which also includes a variety of new features, and I now want to create a beta release for this so that folks can start testing it. 

Normal convention would be to version it v2.4.0b1, however I don't actually know if v2.4.0 will contain this refactoring / featureset (our releases are also tied to a third party, so if they release an update, we do too, so we don't have much control over the timing of our releases; so things like this might be delayed until 2.5.0, for example), so it would seem odd saying that this is a beta of 2.4.0 if 2.4.0 might not ultimately contain it. I just don't yet know which version this is being planned for.

I'm aware that I'm probably overthinking this, but was just curious to see what those in the community might think as well. :)