[Distutils] automating __version__' ing issues

[Alexander Schmolck]

Hi,

I'm still trying to figure out how to handle versioning, including development
release versioning in a simple but automated fashion. Basically assuming svn
had some hypothetical, $Version$ tag, which would either list the user-chosen
version name, plus, if there have been changes since that has been last
assigned, a the project-wide svn-release number (e.g. "1.1" or "1.1.dev43"),
I'd just put that in setup.py, the project's __version__ = ... string in
__init__.py and ideally even the docs. No such thing exists, however and so
far I've been doing it by hand, which is clearly suboptimal, especially since
I'm also currently writing a howto for scikits authors (
<http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scikits>, very rough at the moment) were I'd
like to give best practices.

Basically, if svn had a $Revision$ keyword that worked, I'd just use that in
setup.py and the package's __init__ (and possibly the README). Now
numpy.distutils.utils contains some code to create a __svn_version__.py file
which can then be used in conjunction with a version.py file, in which one
specifies the official version number + a release flag (true or false) to get
either "1.1" or "1.1.dev43". I've started to detail this at
<http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scikits#version.py>, but it seems rather
clumsy and also has the disadvantage that one needs to use numpy.distutils in
addtition to setuptools, further complicating things (numpy.distutils is also
not that well documented IMO, and I haven't got the approach to work as I
would want).

So I was wondering if there wasn't maybbe a nicer way to achieve this, using
just setuptools. I've had a look at
 
<http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#id31>

but from that it's e.g. not clear to me how one would obtain the right
__version__ string in ``project/__init__.py``. I think I might just have
missed the right info in the docs, but I'd really appreciate it if someone
could walk me through the steps how I can specify at one place that I want to
create a proper release with version X or a development release with version
X.devY and have this info available everywhere it's needed.

cheers,

'as