[Distutils] Preferring final releases

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Jim Fulton wrote:
> I think easy_install and setuptools should provide a similar option  
> and provide a way (presumably through setup.cfg) to make it the  
> default.  For backward compatibility reasons, it may not be possible  
> to make this the default policy for setuptools, although, arguably,  
> it is a better default.

+1 for adding this option. Without such an option, it's pretty hard to 
specify you only want actual final releases, unless you tie down the 
release number entirely. A project has a harder time releasing betas of 
their next iteration as well, as people might be pulling it in before 
they are ready. A way to prevent this from happening would be to spell 
out exact release numbers for all dependencies in all the setup.py's. 
It's tricky to specify this with <, by the way:

foo > 4.0 and foo < 4.1

will still get you 4.1b, which is what you frequently don't want.

Regards,

Martijn