Where should the issue go? We should have a standard object that either comes from pyqi or from bipy that basically is:

```python
class Version(object):
    def __init__(self, major, minor, micro, releaselevel): 
        # borrowing from sys.version_info
        self.major = major
        ...
```

And then in a downstream package, like QIIME, at the top level ``__init__.py`` we do:

```python
from foo import Version

qiime_version = Version(1, 8, 0, 'release')
```