How should I be handling package versions? In the process of migrating some code to Pants as a proof of concept. What I've done up till now -- before ever running

pants package

-- is to add a text

resource

that has a version string inside it. (It's not something that I want to do long term, but it has gotten me this far...). Today I'm looking at the

pants package

goal and have added this to the build file:

python_sources(
    dependencies=[":version"]
)

resource(
    # Adding a version file as a package resource
    name="version",
    source="VERSION"
)

python_distribution(
    name="dist",
    ...
    provides=python_artifact(
        ...
        # Adding a version here too, as required by `provides=`?
        version="1.2.3+what",
    ),
)

So now I have two ways of declaring a package version. And two ways of inspecting the version at runtime. In the first version, I am able do

version = pkgutil.get_data(__name__, "VERSION").decode().strip()

from the python runtime to get the package version using the text file. On the other hand, this is not guaranteed to coincide with the package metadata's notion of a version, which is given by the

provides

argument of

python_distribution

Which versioning mechanism is correct? Also, what alternatives exist? As for why we want to inspect the package version at runtime: Some of our CLI tools provide a --version option, and to accomplish this we inspect the package version and echo that back to the user in the terminal.