__author__

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Peter L Hansen wrote:

> Jeffrey Froman wrote:
>
>> Peter L Hansen wrote:
>>
>>> they will never actually be used (except for __version__)
>>
>>
>> So what uses __version__ ?
>
>
> Very many third party packages I have installed.  It's
> not that it is *consumed* by anything, but that it seems to
> be a very widely used convention.
>
> A quick scan shows it is present in:

...

> - Numeric
> - OpenGL

And the plan is that newer versions of PyOpenGL are going to be using 
Numeric's __version__ to decide what stub-dlls to load (or at least, to 
complain if the version doesn't match what PyOpenGL was compiled 
against).  Generally speaking, the purpose of the meta-data is to have a 
run-time queryable mechanism to determine information about the 
package.  Author isn't likely to be that interesting at run-time (save 
for very specialised email-a-bug-report type stuff), but version allows 
you to imply capabilities for the package.

Oh, IIRC, pydoc treats those __names__ as special and creates a separate 
section for them (then they are duplicated in the "data" section IIRC).

Have fun,
Mike

________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com