[Python-Dev] PEP 396, Module Version Numbers

[Éric Araujo]

 Hi,

 Le 07/04/2011 13:10, Michael Foord a écrit :
>>> On 4/5/2011 11:52 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>>>      __version__ = 
>>> pkgutil.get_distribution('elle').metadata['version']
> I really dislike this way of specifying the version. For a start it 
> is
> really ugly.
>
> 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).
>
> 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".

 This is similar to my own comment on distutils-sig:

> One of the main complaint against setuptools is that having to change
> your application code because of the packaging tool used was not a 
> good
> idea.  Having to use require instead of import or resource_whatever
> instead of open (or get_data, the most sadly underused function in 
> the
> stdlib) because you use setuptools instead of distutils was a bad 
> thing.
>
> As stated in the PEP, having a __version__ attribute in the module is
> common, so my opinion is that making the packaging tool use that info 
> is
> the Right Thing™, and having the dependency in the reverse sense is
> wrong.  I don’t see a problem with having harmless duplication in the
> *installed* system, once in  elle.__version__ and once in the pkgutil
> metadata database.

 Barry’s reply:

> I'm including this section because at Pycon, some people did express 
> an
> interest in deriving the version number in this direction.  I wanted 
> to
> capture what that might look like.  Since this is an informational 
> PEP, I
> think it makes sense to include alternative approaches, but I tend to 
> agree
> with you that it will be much more common to define 
> module.__version__ and
> derive the metadata from that.

 IOW, you can define the version only once, either in your source file 
 or
 in the setup.cfg file, and the PEP describes how to get that info from
 the other place.  My personal opinion is that the approach using
 pkgutil.get_distribution should be much less prominent than the one
 putting the version in the Python code.

 Regards