Repository navigation
Add easily comparable version info to toplevel #18312
Description
Problem
Currently matplotlib only exposes __version__. For quick version checks, exposing either a version_info tuple (which can be compared with other tuples) or a LooseVersion instance (which can be properly compared with other strings) would be a small usability improvement.
(In practice I guess boring string comparisons will work just fine until we hit mpl 3.10 or 4.10 which is unlikely to happen soon, but that feels quite dirty :))
Proposed Solution
I guess I slightly prefer LooseVersion, but exposing just a version_info tuple is much more common in other packages (and perhaps simpler to understand). The hardest(?) part is probably just bikeshedding this point :-)
Additional context and prior art
version_info is a pretty common thing (citation needed).
Activity
timhoffm commentedon Nov 1, 2020
It seems that
__version_info__is the way to go.Prior art
There's no official specification for version tuples. PEP 396 - Module Version Numbers only defines the string
__version__.Many projects don't bother with version tuples.
When they do,
__version_info__seems to be a common thing:Python itself has the string sys.version and the (named)tuple sys.version_info. In analogy to that
__version_info__next to__version__makes sense for packages.