[Python-Dev] Module version variable

[Michael Foord]

On 16/03/2011 12:39, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> 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"
>

unittest also has an outdated (and unmaintained) version number that I 
would like to remove. Standard library modules should be versioned by 
the release of Python they are packaged with (unless they are externally 
maintained I guess) and so should preferably *not* carry version info.

All the best,

Michael

> This is obviously out of date and this variable is not used anywhere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?
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