Add API_VERSION constant storing the runtime version as a tuple of ints

[dgelessus]

Part of one of the potential fixes for kaitai-io/kaitai_struct#804.

[dgelessus]

Since this topic came up again in #62 - any objections to merging this (followed by kaitai-io/kaitai_struct_compiler#208)? I don't remember all of the details of the long discussion in kaitai-io/kaitai_struct#804, but IIRC there were no strong objections to this solution.

[dgelessus]

Actually, I need to update this first to bump all of the version numbers. I created this PR before the release of KS 0.9, so all of the comments still say 0.9 and not 0.10.

[KOLANICH]

IMHO the symbol should either start with underscore or have KAITAI in the beginning of the name. And __version__ string should be generated automatically.

[dgelessus]

IMHO the symbol should either start with underscore or have KAITAI in the beginning of the name.

Why do you think the name should be changed this way?

An underscore would be misleading. API_VERSION is not an internal variable - quite the opposite, it will be used by ksc-generated code, so it has to be kept stable in future versions of the runtime. An extra KAITAI prefix would be redundant IMO, because the attribute is already namespaced under the kaitaistruct module, so there should be no confusion about which API version it's referring to.

IMHO the symbol should either start with underscore or have KAITAI in the beginning of the name. And __version__ string should be generated automatically.

I don't think we can do that. The __version__ value needs to be a string literal in the source code, so that setuptools can statically extract the version number from the code (for the attr: kaitaistruct.__version__ directive in setup.cfg).

[dgelessus]

Rebased on top of #64 to update the Kaitai Struct version number.

[KOLANICH]

so that setuptools can statically extract the version number from the code (for the attr: kaitaistruct.__version__ directive in setup.cfg).

I am not sure it does it statically, for static extraction there is read_version package.

[dgelessus]

I am not sure it does it statically, for static extraction there is read_version package.

setuptools 46.4.0 and later will parse attribute values statically if possible. If that fails, it still falls back to importing the module, but I would like to avoid that if possible.

[generalmimon]

@dgelessus LGTM, thanks!