[Dev] Milestone numbering going forward

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:43 PM 11/29/2005 -0800, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
>pje actually mentioned something like this on IRC as a suggestion:
>0.7dev-m1, 0.7dev-m1 etc. (I think). I don't know how well that would
>work with .rpm, .deb and other installers.

The assumption was that 'dev' releases don't get such 
installers.  EasyInstall and Python eggs support 'dev' as one of many 
possible "prerelease tags" that indicate a version is under development, 
and is treated as *older* than the final release.

In other words, in egg version terms, version "0.7" > "0.7dev-m6" > 
"0.7dev-m1".  A lot of current Python projects out there (such as 
SQLObject, TurboGears, setuptools, etc.) doing continuous releases from 
Subversion use a scheme like "0.9a0.dev-r1263", which means "Subversion 
revision 1263 of the development version of code being worked on prior to 
the first alpha release of 0.9".  This scheme is handled automatically by 
setuptools, which can be configured to automatically sniff the Subversion 
revision number and add it to the project's version information when 
building eggs.  It has proven to be particularly helpful when lots of 
people are using various Subversion checkouts of a rapidly-moving project.

Anyway, I mentioned this in passing only, because we are not yet using eggs 
so their versioning rules (i.e., distinguishing between pre-release and 
post-release versions) do not apply to us yet.  However, if anyone is 
interested in learning about the version schemes usable with eggs, you can see:

    http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools/setuptools.txt

Under the heading "Specifying Your Project's Version", down around line 185.