How to mark a ruby package as a beta or developer release

Question

Is there a way to mark or version a ruby package, specifically a rubygem, as a developer or beta release?

In the Perl world, there is a widely respected convention of the underscore-separated minuscule number indicating a developer release. That is, 1.23_01 is a dev release following ordinary release 1.23, and the main Perl packaging software and community distribution site know this. Is there a similar practice for ruby?

Answer 1

Rubygems supports the notion of prerelease gems. To mark a gem version as a prerelease you just have to include at least one letter in the version number (for example 1.0.a, 1.0.beta1, 1.0.dev1).

Rubygems version numbers must match this regular expression: [0-9]+(\.[0-9a-zA-Z]+)*, thus hyphens or underscores are not allowed.