[Python-Dev] Module version variable (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Wed Mar 16 17:53:34 CET 2011

On Mar 16, 2011, at 12:39 PM, 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_ver = "turtle 1.1b- - for Python 3.1 - 4. 5. 2009" This is obviously out of date and this variable is not used anywhere in the module.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?

MvL and I had a discussion about this at the sprint. I am planning on writing an informational PEP that proposes version as a standard convention. I'd like to be able to do:

>>> import foo
>>> foo.__version__

It won't be mandatory (thus the informational PEP), but it should be formalized as the preferred way to introspect a module for its version number. I think there should be ways to spell this easily if the information is provided to packaging/distutils2 so that it can basically always be kept up to date without violating DRY.

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