Anyway, the question now for me is whether this is worth any more of my time.

So:

- Is there someone willing to sponsor?

- Do folks generally think there's a chance of it being accepted without a huge debate and expansion of scope.

I think that before these can be answered, you need to decide why this needs to be standardized. I don't see any reason to standardize it unless there's some programmatic use for these version strings. If it's just the user poking around on the REPL, then I think the status quo is fine. I've read the PEP, and the User Stories section talks about user convenience, not programmatic access.

I also think the distribution version is more useful than any __version__ information in each module/package. I realize this information might not be available, depending on how the code was installed (say, just by copying some files into the right place).

Eric