I am happy for the ``__str__`` method to change to be more informative. As you are fully aware, there is probably no sensible standards we can follow easily and deciding on a format is tricky. As we have the commit count which is actually useful for ordering, I feel this should be in any such string. Here are my suggestions (which looks to be compliant with ``StrictVersion`` in the PEP)

For releases, something like '1.1' is fine.
For development, we could do '1.1dev54' (where 54 is the commit count since 1.1)

 My only other concern is that whatever we do much still work with ``pip`` (e.g. prefixing with 'v' didn't seem to work properly with ``pip``).

I would prefer if you merge this PR so I can change it properly on master if this is the last change you would like to see.