Where is the NumPy version string documented?

Question

What are the possible NumPy version strings? What is the standard? Where is this documented?

1.4.0dev7059
1.4.0b1
1.4.0rc2

I've seen dev, b, rc.

Answer 1

b, dev, rc signify beta, development release and release candidate, respectively. Some of this is documented in the Release Notes:

Version Number explanation:

1.0.X will be maintainence releases (modules will not need recompilation)

1.X will be major stable releases which might contain changes to the C-API and therefore might require re-compilation of extension modules

1.0.1.dev3432 indicates SVN version 3432 of the development release leading up to 1.0.1

1.1.dev3532 indicates SVN version 3532 of the development release leading up to 1.1

1.0b2.dev2952 indicates SVN version 2952 of the development release leading up to the second beta release of version 1.0

Also see the section titled "Version Numbering" in the State of Scipy (PDF) document, which specifies the <major.minor.bugfix> scheme. (More generally, the wikipedia article on Versioning may be useful.)