Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: > I currently read this metadata from the Python code itself. The > advantages of putting the metadata into the source code include: > > - the source code is the definitive source of information about itself;
The Changelog document should be in the same source tree and maintained by the same people, so I don't count that as a difference between the two approaches. > - even if the user deletes the README and CHANGELOG files, they can > still find the metadata; Perhaps I didn't emphasise it, but: The approach I'm advocating (as inspired by Debian packaging tools) has the version metadata *canonically* recorded in the Changelog, but not *only* stored there. The packaging tools parse the version metadata from the Changelog, then duplicate whatever metadata is needed in various other places — such as for programmatic access by the package's own code. > - if your application wants to report a version number (as many apps > do) then it is easy for them to do so. The idea is to parse from the Changelog the version metadata, and record it in Setuptools metadata. Then the ‘pkg_resources’ module of Setuptools allows programmatic access to that metadata. Thanks for enumerating those points, I think they are adequately addressed by this approach. > > I've now produced a small Python library which knows how to > > transform a reST Changelog to package metadata; and how to get that > > package metadata into and out of a Python distribution with > > Distutils. > > Sounds interesting. Where can we see this? It is the approach used in ‘python-daemon’ version 2. Find the source at <URL:https://alioth.debian.org/projects/python-daemon/>. The ‘ChangeLog’, ‘setup.py’, ‘version.py’, ‘daemon/_metadata.py’ files are the relevant ones to examine. Since this is a new approach I'm trying, I flubbed a couple of versions: you'll need version 2.0.1 or later (I omitted the ‘version’ module entirely from the earlier distribution), and you'll need ‘docutils’ already installed (a future ‘python-daemon’ distribution will declare this dependency). I'll be interested to see how Python developers like this. -- \ “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the | `\ mind is repelled.” —John Kenneth Galbraith, _Money: Whence It | _o__) Came, Where It Went_, 1975 | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
