Naming convention for pre-release versions

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/