[Python-Dev] PEP 396, Module Version Numbers (original) (raw)

Ben Finney ben+python at benfinney.id.au
Sun Apr 10 00:52:24 CEST 2011

Howdy Barry,

Nitpick: Please call these “version strings”. A version string is hardly ever just one number, and not in the general case anyway.

I'd like to suggest another user story:

Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> writes:

User Stories ============

Emily maintains a package consisting of programs and modules in
several languages that inter-operate; several are Python, but some
are Unix shell, Perl, and there are some C modules. Emily decides
the simplest API for all these modules to get the package version
string is a single text file named ``version`` at the root of the
project tree. All the programs and modules, including the
``setup.py`` file, simply read the contents of ``version`` to get
the version string.

This is an often-overlooked case, I think. The unspoken assumption is often that setup.py is a suitable place for the overall version string, but this is not the case when that string must be read by non-Python programs.

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