On Apr 07, 2011, at 12:10 PM, Michael Foord wrote:
On 4/5/2011 11:52 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
DEFAULT_VERSION_RE = re.compile(r'(?P<version>\d+\.\d(?:\.\d+)?)')
__version__ = pkgutil.get_distribution('elle').metadata['version']
I really dislike this way of specifying the version. For a start it is really ugly.
Agreed! There should be a higher level API for this, e.g.: __version__ = pkgutil.get_version('elle')
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).
That would have to be an important feature of .get_version() I think.
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".
It definitely shouldn't prevent this. I personally do the same thing, and it seems the least bad way of doing it. I think the clear version string assigned to __version__ is the best recommendation (though not the only one) that the PEP makes. -Barry