[Python-Dev] Module version variable

[Alexander Belopolsky]

I was editing the turtle module (for issue11571, if you are
interested) when I noticed that it has the following line:

_ver = "turtle 1.1b- - for Python 3.1   -  4. 5. 2009"

This is obviously out of date and this variable is not used anywhere
in the module.  I would simply delete it, but I wonder if there is any
recommended mechanism for maintaining module versions.

Some modules define __version__ which has a special meaning at least
for pydoc and possibly some third party tools.  In many cases it is
never updated and its format and meaning varies from module to module.
 (For example, decimal module stores the version of the spec rather
than the version of the module in __version__.)

In several instances, __version__ is set to "$Revision$" in an
apparent attempt to leverage VCS to keep it up to date, but this does
not seem to work after hg transition.  For example,

$  ./python.exe -m pydoc pydoc
..
VERSION
    $Revision$

The other affected modules are pickle and tarfile.

Do you have an advise on how these issues should be handled?