Description of problem:

Building pre-release python distutils packages with python setup.py
bdist_rpm
works, but the version number is "RPM-higher" than the official release
package
that is released later.

This constitutes a problem because many of the components in major
Python apps
like Zope -- distributed as cheese shop eggs and downloadable via pip or
buildout -- are pre-release packages which, when turned into RPMs, contain
RPM-invalid version numbers.  The RPMs build, but the pre-release
packages are
considered "newer" by yum, so you can imagine the havoc that breaks.

How reproducible:

always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. python setup.py bdist_rpm
2. inspect version / release number of resulting RPMs, find out it's wrong
3. do not profit!

Actual results:

distutils package version: 1.4a
rpm package version: 1.4a


Expected results:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/NamingGuidelines#Non-Numeric_Version_in_Release

Additional info:

patch attached.  works against python 2.4, may apply fine to python 2.5
or 2.6
too since distutils hasn't undergone that big of a rewrite.  

Ojo: the patch has been tested with distutils AND setuptools.