Re: [Distutils] Splitting distribute in several distributions

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Hanno Schlichting wrote:

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

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On Aug 12, 2009, at 4:35 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

One feature I would love to see make standard is the ability to import a package and check its __version__.  Version information must be available from Python, and it seems like __version__ is the standard place to put it. Too many times I've had to figure out the version of foo.bar that I'm using.  When I can do

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import foo.bar foo.bar.__version__ 3.2.1

I am a much happier camper.

The easiest way I could find right now seems to be:

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import pkg_resources dist = pkg_resources.get_distribution('foo') dist.version 3.2.1

Which isn't too bad and could be simplified into an even simpler API call.

If the package author doesn't set a __version__ attribute in his own code, I'd be hesitant to magically make it available from the accompanying metadata. If it's part of the metadata, an explicit API that makes it clear that you are querying the package metadata seems cleaner to me.

yes, and with PEP 376 (which I need to work back in asap), it will be similar and we will have that explicit, clean, get_metadata api. Notice that I think it's better to use pkg_resources (and PEP 376) tehcnique because it grabs the version number in the PKG-INFO file which is static, and doesn't forces you to import a module in the execution context just to get the version. You never know what gets executed when you import a module Cheers Tarek

Hanno _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org