Code anntotations (copyright, autor, etc) in your code

[Nick Craig-Wood]

mattia <gervaz at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Hi all, which are the usual comments that you put at the beginning of 
>  your code to explain e.g. the author, the usage, the license etc?
> 
>  I've found useful someting like:
>  #-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  # Name:        About.py
>  # Purpose:
>  #
>  # Author:      
>  #
>  # Created:     2009
>  # Copyright:   (c) 2009
>  # Licence:     GPL
>  #-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>  others put something like
> 
>  __author__ = "Name Surname"
>  __year__   = 2009
> 
>  What do you use?

__version__ is suggested in PEP 8

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

__author__,  __date__ and __credits__ are both understood by pydoc but
I haven't actually seen that in a document only in the source code!

I think the others are just conventions and are not actually used by
anything, but I'd be interested to be proved wrong!

I tend to use

__author__ = "Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com>"
__version__ = "$Revision: 5034 $"
__date__ = "$Date: 2009-02-03 16:50:01 +0000 (Tue, 03 Feb 2009) $"
__copyright__ = "Copyright (c) 2008 Nick Craig-Wood"

With __version__ and __date__ being version control tags (in this case
svn)

Pydoc produces this from the above

------------------------------------------------------------
[snip]

DATA
    __author__ = 'Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com>'
    __copyright__ = 'Copyright (c) 2008 Nick Craig-Wood'
    __date__ = '$Date: 2009-02-03 16:50:01 +0000 (Tue, 03 Feb 2009) $'
    __version__ = '$Revision: 5034 $'

VERSION
    5034

DATE
    $Date: 2009-02-03 16:50:01 +0000 (Tue, 03 Feb 2009) $

AUTHOR
    Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com>
------------------------------------------------------------

pydoc pydoc shows an example of what __credits__ looks like

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick