diff --git a/extras/make_release.sh b/extras/make_release.sh
index 08730006c..0f8f3dbc3 100755
--- a/extras/make_release.sh
+++ b/extras/make_release.sh
@@ -6,8 +6,8 @@
 hg purge --all
 
 # build packages
-version=$(python -c "import scrapy; print scrapy.__version__")
-python setup.py sdist
+#version=$(python -c "import scrapy; print scrapy.__version__")
+#python setup.py sdist
 # FIXME: bdist_wininst doesn't work on Unix (it doesn't include the data_files)
 #python setup.py bdist_wininst -t "Scrapy $version" -p "win32"
 
diff --git a/scrapy/__init__.py b/scrapy/__init__.py
index f9f348332..c4472cf8a 100644
--- a/scrapy/__init__.py
+++ b/scrapy/__init__.py
@@ -3,8 +3,8 @@ Scrapy - a screen scraping framework written in Python
 """
 
 # IMPORTANT: remember to also update the version in docs/conf.py
-version_info = (0, 7, 0, 'candidate', 0)
-__version__ = "0.7.0-rc1"
+version_info = (0, 8, 0, '', 0)
+__version__ = "0.8.0-dev"
 
 import sys, os