If we allow all versions of 1.8, shouldn't this be <1.9?
The reason for this is to work around the issue of alpha/beta/dev releases. Stephen Gallagher approached us once before with an issue where a version range doing <x.y actually resulted in some compatibility issues, and upon some discussion, we determined the best way to work around Python's version range support issus in this area is to pick a very high .z release for the max range.
Some of the new version comparison stuff might let us do something a little nicer, but it also depends on the latest-and-greatest versions of setuptools, pip, etc. Using .999 works pretty well, and we're using it already in both Review Board and Djblets for several dependencies.
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