RubyGems: versioning devel releases

From what I understand by reading rubygems.org and checking
out the source, development/prerelease versions are recongised
as ones sporting letters (instead of just digits and dots).

Is there a way to explicitly mark a gem as prerelease
without putting a letter in the version number?

If one has the classic (old?) versioning model of ‘even
minor version numbers mean stable, odd minor version
numbers mean devel’, does it mean that the devel versions
need to have a letter tagged at the end (like 2.7.2.dev)?

— Piotr S.

On Jan 31, 2011, at 04:30 , Piotr S. wrote:

From what I understand by reading rubygems.org and checking
out the source, development/prerelease versions are recongised
as ones sporting letters (instead of just digits and dots).

Is there a way to explicitly mark a gem as prerelease
without putting a letter in the version number?

No. It is entirely off of the matching of /[a-zA-Z]/

If one has the classic (old?) versioning model of even
minor version numbers mean stable, odd minor version
numbers mean devel, does it mean that the devel versions
need to have a letter tagged at the end (like 2.7.2.dev)?

Yes.