[Python-Dev] PEP 396, Module Version Numbers

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 07, 2011, at 12:10 PM, Michael Foord wrote:

>>> On 4/5/2011 11:52 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>>>
>>>      DEFAULT_VERSION_RE = re.compile(r'(?P<version>\d+\.\d(?:\.\d+)?)')
>>>
>>>      __version__ = pkgutil.get_distribution('elle').metadata['version']
>>>
>
>I really dislike this way of specifying the version. For a start it is really
>ugly.

Agreed!  There should be a higher level API for this, e.g.:

__version__ = pkgutil.get_version('elle')

>More importantly it means the version information is *only* available if the
>package has been installed by "packaging", and so isn't available for the
>parts of my pre-build process like building the documentation (which import
>the version number to put into the docs).

That would have to be an important feature of .get_version() I think.

>Currently all my packages have the canonical version number information in
>the package itself using:
>
>     __version__ = '1.2.3'
>
>Anything that needs the version number, including setup.py for upload to
>pypi, has one place to look for it and it doesn't depend on any other tools
>or processes. If switching to "packaging" prevents me from doing this then it
>will inhibit me using "packaging".

It definitely shouldn't prevent this.  I personally do the same thing, and it
seems the least bad way of doing it.  I think the clear version string
assigned to __version__ is the best recommendation (though not the only one)
that the PEP makes.

-Barry
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