Comment 2 for bug 1445949

No. It shouldn't. Unfortunately, PEP-440 describes a versioning scheme that is incompatible with the versioning long used in Debian and it's derivatives such as Ubuntu. As the PEP says, "The main reason to even have a standardised version scheme in the first place is to make it easier to do reliable automated dependency analysis." We already have another system to do that and python-apt is conforming to it.

If one were to conform to PEP 440, then the package would be incompatible with distro versioning requirements.

Note: This is not general issue for Python packages. It is only a conflict for Debian/Ubuntu native packages like python-apt.