[Distutils] version scheme: a case for dropping ".devNNN" and ".postNNN"

[P.J. Eby]

At 03:16 PM 6/11/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>2009/6/11 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> > PyPI uploads aren't a suitable basis for analyzing "dev" use cases, since
> > the whole point of having a "dev" tag is for *non-released* versions.
> >  (E.g., in-progress development via SVN.)
>
>If it's non-released, I've yet to see a clear explanation of why the
>PEP is relevant. Who is going to use an API from the PEP to parse your
>"version number", and why?
>
> > Dev tags are so that while you're
> > doing development, your locally-installed versions can be 
> distinguished from
> > one another.
>
>Distinguished by what? What code (that you didn't write yourself,
>purely for internal use) needs to parse your dev tag?

Distinguished by setuptools for processing version requirements of 
scripts, or require() statements in code, and installation 
requirements of newly-installed code.

For example, if I'm working on two projects that are distributed via 
SVN and one depends on the other, if I update one, it may require an 
update of the other; the failure of the .dev#### version requirement 
in the first one will inform me of the need to "svn up" the second 
project and rerun "setup.py develop" on it.

This is a routine circumstance in at least my development cycle; I 
would expect that it's the case in other open source development 
workflows as well as proprietary ones.