What is the correct way to share package version with setup.py and the package?

Question

With distutils, setuptools, etc. a package version is specified in setup.py:

# file: setup.py
...
setup(
name=\'foobar         


        

Answer 1

Based on the accepted answer and comments, this is what I ended up doing:

file: setup.py

setup(
    name='foobar',
    version='1.0.0',
    # other attributes
)

file: __init__.py

from pkg_resources import get_distribution, DistributionNotFound

__project__ = 'foobar'
__version__ = None  # required for initial installation

try:
    __version__ = get_distribution(__project__).version
except DistributionNotFound:
    VERSION = __project__ + '-' + '(local)'
else:
    VERSION = __project__ + '-' + __version__
    from foobar import foo
    from foobar.bar import Bar

Explanation:

• __project__ is the name of the project to install which may be different than the name of the package

• VERSION is what I display in my command-line interfaces when --version is requested

• the additional imports (for the simplified package interface) only occur if the project has actually been installed