Field or API to report version?

[mharbison72]

I'm trying to report the version of the keyring package from the mercurial_keyring extension to aid in debugging[1]. This is a similar request to #537, but the issue here is that when bundled with py2exe or py2app, pkg_resources.get_distribution() ignores what's bundled in the app and looks at what was installed by pip. What I think I need is the ability to import the keyring code, and either reference a field or call a function.

I've not used setuptools_scm mentioned in #537, but it looks like there's a write_to option mentioned in its readme that would generate a file with the version field. Does that work as it sounds like, or is there a better way of doing this?

[1] https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/mercurial_keyring/-/merge_requests/17

[jaraco]

It used to be the case that keyring and other packages would present the version as <module>.__version__, but it turns out that loading that value is sometimes problematic and provides little value over the recommended way to retrieve the version from metadata anyway, which is what I recommend. Use importlib.metadata (or its backport):

from importlib import metadata


keyring_version = metadata.version('keyring')

On Python 3.7 or earlier, you'll need the backport.

This technique will work for any package and not just keyring.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have further questions.