[Distutils] Specifying version information once

[P.J. Eby]

At 09:05 PM 5/19/2009 -0400, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
>On Tue, 19 May 2009 20:49:37 -0400, "P.J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>>At 04:28 PM 5/19/2009 -0400, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
>>>On Tue, 19 May 2009 16:23:16 -0400, "P.J. Eby" 
>>><pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>>>>At 02:21 PM 5/19/2009 -0400, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
>>>>>What is the recommendation for specifying version information in 
>>>>>a way which
>>>>>is compatible with all these new tools?
>>>>
>>>>Don't import the file with your version info; execfile() it instead.
>>>>
>>>>That is, you can have a somepackage.version module for importing, 
>>>>but from within your setup.py, do 
>>>>execfile('somepackage/version.py') instead, so as to avoid 
>>>>actually importing your package (and anything it depends on).
>>>
>>>execfile() doesn't set __name__ properly; setting __name__ in a namespace
>>>passed to execfile() produces a CPython SystemError.  At the moment my
>>>version code depends on __name__ being set.  I'm sure I could work around
>>>this, but it'd be better if I didn't have to worry about code in the
>>>version module being executed in two unrelated contexts.  Any other
>>>suggestions?
>>
>>Well, if you're okay with depending on setuptools, you could have 
>>your version code do this:
>>
>>   version = pkg_resources.require('ThisProject')[0].version
>>
>>And *only* define the version in setup.py, but don't import or run that code.
>
>I don't think I'm ready to make setuptools a mandatory dependency yet.
>
>>Of, if you can't depend on setuptools (no pun intended), the only 
>>other thing I can think of would be to put the version in a text 
>>file by itself, and have both the version code and setup.py read that file.
>
>That's an idea that's come up before.  I'm curious to here if anyone has
>tried it and what their experiences have been.

Oh, now that I think of it, there is one other thing that I've 
done.  For some of my packages (including setuptools itself), I use a 
script that automatically searches and replaces version numbers, and 
stores the current version number in a configuration file.  Another 
configuration file specifies what files to edit and what format to 
insert the numbers in.  So, I just do a quick command line like 
'./version incr build' to increment the most-minor version number in 
the docs, the setup.py, and even to edit my release script.

And I suppose one last idea that you could use would be to define 
your version string in the module in such a way that setup.py could 
read it with a regular expression match, so it wouldn't be actually 
executing the code.