[Distutils] metadata/versions

[Alexander Michael]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>  Apologies if these questions have been answered elsewhere, if they have,
>  please point me at the answers. I've been trying to follow the discussion
>  but the shear volume has overwhelmed me...
>
>  1. Is there a canonical way to tell what version a python package thinks
>  it is?

Not in practice.

>  2. Does the python package index contain dependency information? If not,
>  why not? ;-)

Not really.

I am far from the authority on these topics, but my understanding as a
user is that PEPs 241,314,345 attempt to address these issues but are
not used in practice. I do not know how to query an installed package
to determine its version in canonical way (lot's of projects use
__version__, but it isn't required and isn't guaranteed to agree with
what distutils thinks is the package version number -- perhaps even
worse you have to import the module to get at it). While projects
could provide (python package) dependency information with PEP 314, I
don't know which ones do, if any. All of this could be from a lack of
education on my part, but my guess is that if it were widely used and
available it wouldn't be such an issue and I would know more about it
since I tend to read the "official" tutorials and manuals.