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[Python-Dev] Module version variable

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Sat Mar 19 04:12:19 CET 2011 
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 07:40:43PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> > Tres Seaver wrote:
> >
> >> I'm not even sure why you would want __version__ in 99% of modules:  in
> >> the ordinary cases, a module's version should be either the Python
> >> version (for a module shipped in the stdlib), or the release of the
> >> distribution which shipped it.
> >
> > It's useful to be able to find out the version of a module
> > you're using at run time so you can cope with API changes.
> >
> > I had a case just recently where the behaviour of something
> > in pywin32 changed between one release and the next. I looked
> > for an attribute called 'version' or something similar to
> > test, but couldn't find anything.
> >
> > +1 on having a standard place to look for version info.
> 
> I believe __version__ *is* the standard (like __author__). IIRC it was
> proposed by Ping. I think this convention is so old that there isn't a
> PEP for it. So yes, we might as well write it down. But it's really
> nothing new.
> 
There is a section in PEP8 about __version__ but it serves a slightly
different purpose there:

"""
Version Bookkeeping

    If you have to have Subversion, CVS, or RCS crud in your source file, do
    it as follows.

        __version__ = "$Revision: 88433 $"
        # $Source$

    These lines should be included after the module's docstring, before any
    other code, separated by a blank line above and below.
"""

Personally, I've never found a need to access the repository revision
programatically from my pyhon applications but I have needed to access the
API version so it would make sense to me to change the meaning of
__version__.

-Toshio
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