[Distutils] distribute 0.6.10 and convert_2to3_doctests

[ssteinerX@gmail.com]

On Jan 29, 2010, at 7:32 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

> "P.J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> writes:
> 
>> At 04:05 PM 1/29/2010 -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>>> The important thing is to have exactly one place to set the package's
>>> version number.
>> 
>> Put it in setup.py, then.  If you absolutely must have a __version__
>> at runtime, use this to extract it from the installation metadata:
>> 
>>    __version__ = pkg_resources.require('MyProject')[0].version
>> 
>> Mostly, though, I don't bother with having a __version__ in my modules
>> or packages any more, since you can just do the above if you want to
>> check the installed version of something.
> 
> That assumes that the only things that will need to query the package's
> version are Python modules. That's often not the case, especially when
> there are other tools (e.g. shell programs, make files, or any program
> not written in Python) that are part of the same package.
> 
> Better would be to have a *non-executable* data file containing the
> version string and other such package meta-data. “Query the metadata”
> should not necessarily imply “parse or execute a bunch of Python code”.

I'd love to have a standard, documented way to set/query module versions.  

I actually started this e-mail about a week ago when I went looking for a "standard" way to version something the other day and, after I couldn't find a definitive answer by Googling, went looking in the stdlib for guidance.

I started with two core modules, sys and distutils, and tried just doing the same things to both modules:

>>> import sys

>>> sys.version
'2.6.4 (r264:75821M, Oct 27 2009, 19:48:32) \n[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)]'

>>> sys.version_info
(2, 6, 4, 'final', 0)

>>> sys.__version__
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '__version__'

#--------------------------------------------

>>> import distutils

>>> distutils.version
<module 'distutils.version' from '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/version.pyc'>

>>> distutils.version_info
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'version_info'

>>> distutils.__version__
'2.6.4'

The standard library, and modules in PyPI, are all over the place on it so maybe a completely new API/method is in order.

S