testtools does not conform to PEP 396

[David Riddle]

For our package management we use automated tooling to extract version numbers from python packages. I would like to request that you change the __version__ attribute so that it conforms to PEP 396. Currently __version__ returns a tuple according to PEP 396 it should return a string. From what I have seen it is common for the tuple form to be stored in __version_info__.

PEP 396 states:

#. When a module (or package) includes a version number, the version
   SHOULD be available in the ``__version__`` attribute.

#. The ``__version__`` attribute's value SHOULD be a string.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

So, yes, we're not following PEP-396. That said, we've had the current version layout for a long time, and there may well be code depending on it out there.

I'm at best ambivalent about changing this without a major version bump.

Many many packages do not have PEP-396 comaptible version attributes, because it requires opt-in. The distutils database is a much more reliable way to extract version data - everything that is installable is present there. Have you considered using that?

[David Riddle (ddriddle)]

I am not familiar with the distutils database. I googled and I found setuptools pkg_resources and PEP 376, unfortunately I was not able to find any standard functions in python 2.7 that are able to query the database described in PEP 376. Do they exist? Or is the best way to do that is to use setuputils in python 2.7? Thank you for the advise.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Sorry, didn't mean to go quiet.

>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('testtools')
testtools 1.8.0 (/home/robertc/work/pip/.tox/py27/lib/python2.7/site-packages)
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('testtools').version
'1.8.0'
>>> pkg_resources.get_distribution('testtools').project_name
'testtools'