Naming convention for pre-release versions

[Michel Salim]

I was trying to the lame Portfile earlier, and had trouble persuading
the port manager that 3.97 is newer than 3.97b2 (in the end I
uninstalled 3.97b2 and ran the install from the same directory as the
updated Portfile).

Is there a convention for naming such pre-release versions? I'm
thinking of the Fedora Extras-esque '3.97-0.beta2', where the
alpha/beta release gets encoded in the revision field, and always
preceded by a '0'. The final version can then be revision 1, and
everyone's happy.

Regards,

-- 
Michel Salim
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~msalim
http://the-dubois-papers.blogspot.com/