Discussion on: I am kind of baffled by this code in the `__init__.py` file in my Python project. How does this work internally?

[Sean Francis N. Ballais]

I get the fact that it checks for dependencies (and their versions) on runtime. But I don't get why it would need to use get_distribution() to get the version of itself. Wouldn't __version__ = 'some_version' suffice?

[dave-shawley]

Technically it gets the version from the named distribution’s metadata - usually the version kwarg to setuptools.setup() in setup.py. This can be different if setup.py dynamically appends SCM information to the hard-coded version number. Take a look at github.com/dave-shawley/setupext-g... for an example.

[Graham Lyons]

It would suffice. This would just avoid the duplication by only having it set in setup.py and reading the value from there.