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

So, I have the following Python code residing in the __init__.py file of my Python project which I autogenerated using PyScaffold.

from pkg_resources import get_distribution, DistributionNotFound

try:
    # Change here if project is renamed and does not equal the package name
    dist_name = 'mlfq-sim'
    __version__ = get_distribution(dist_name).version
except DistributionNotFound:  # pragma: no cover
    # Can't unit test this for now since I do not know how to temporarily
    # remove a distribution during runtime. Help. Also, is this even
    # worth it?
    __version__ = 'unknown'

I get that it gets the version of my project. But how does it do it? Is there a benefit in using it compared to the one below?

__version__ = 'some version'

Comments

[rhymes]

I didn't know about pyscaffold. get_distribution comes from setuptools which is a library to distribute Python projects.

That part I believe is about finding the package version at runtime.

I'd say unless you're shipping a library it's probably overkill.

[Sean Francis N. Ballais]

In what cases would you need to find the package version at runtime?

[rhymes]

Probably for conflict resolution in case multiple packages require your library with different versions...

I'm sorry Sean, I don't know much about this topic :(

[Sean Francis N. Ballais]

It's alright.

[Samuel Abreu]

Check the 5th item on packaging.python.org/guides/single...

It gets the version from setup.py, i believe it checks for dependencies on runtime.

[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?

[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.

[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.