[Moshe]

I just went through the core grepping for '$Revision' and it seems this is the only place this happens -- all the other places either put the default version (RCS cruft and all), or are smart about handling it.

You have not search carefully enough. pyexpat.c has char *rev = "$Revision: 2.44 $"; ... PyModule_AddObject(m, "__version__", PyString_FromStringAndSize(rev+11, strlen(rev+11)-2));

I haven't seen *any* complaints about this, so is it possible that they don't mind having the $Revision: ... $ strings in there?

The problem is that they don't know the problems they run into (yet). E.g. if they import pyexpat.c into their tree, they get 1.1.1.1; even after later imports, they still get 1.x. Now, PyXML currently decides that the Python pyexpat is not good enough if it is older than 2.39. In turn, they might get different code being used when installing out of their CVS as compared to installing from the source distributions. That all shouldn't cause problems, but it would probably help if source releases continue to use -kv; then likely every end-user will get the same sources. I'd volunteer to review the core sources (and produce patches) if that is desired. Regards, Martin