On Mar 20, 2015, at 08:53 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
FWIW, I think __version__, __author__ etc. were bad ideas. Almost nobody manages these correctly. Note that the PEP 8 section starts with less than an endorsement: "If you *have* to have Subversion, CVS, or RCS crud in your source file, do it as follows."
I tend to agree. Individual module version numbers are mostly useless, especially with today's hash-based vcses. That's different than package versions, and for which I really need to resurrect and update PEP 396.
That said, if an official answer is required, common sense would suggest that __version__ should go before the imports. (I would put it before the docstring too, except then the docstring wouldn't be a docstring any more. Go figure.)
And after __future__ imports too, right? Cheers, -Barry