Ergonomic, hermetic, user-friendly software build system for Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, Protobuf, Scala, Shell. Pants lets you fearlessly scale up your codebase!

Pants

The backstory is `egg_info --tag-build &lt;suffix&gt;` is a standard setuptools command that can be prefixed to sdist, bdist_wheel, etc to change the distribution version at build time. Given that bit of technology and this code in pants:
```
try:
  # We're running from a `pantsbuild.pants` distribution which may have a custom version applied at
  # build time.
  VERSION = pkg_resources.get_distribution('pantsbuild.pants').version
except pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound:
  # We're running from bare sources.
  VERSION = pkgutil.get_data(__name__, 'VERSION').strip()
```

... does anyone gack? does anyone cheer?

Where would the second implementation be set?

or, rather... where would the second copy of the version be initialized? somewhere in `release.sh`?

Yeah - there is no second copy, VERSION is read by pants.version.py and stuffed into the setup.py we generate in ./pants setup-py. The `python setup.py egg_info -b+suffix bdist_wheel` then appends the +suffix to the version read from setup.py