Notes

Restrictions & Caveats

  • When building or installing a project that uses versioningit, the entire repository history (or at least everything back through the most recent tag) must be available. This means that installing from a shallow clone (the default on most CI systems) will not work. If you are using the "git" or "git-archive" vcs method and have default-tag set in [tool.versioningit.vcs], then shallow clones will end up assigned the default tag, which may or may not be what you want.

  • If using the [tool.versioningit.write] subtable to write the version to a file, this file will only be updated whenever the project is built or installed. If using editable installs, this means that you must re-run python setup.py develop or pip install -e . after each commit if you want the version to be up-to-date.

  • If you define & use a custom method inside your Python project’s package, you will not be able to retrieve your project version by calling importlib.metadata.version() inside __init__.py — at least, not without a try: ... except ... wrapper. This is because versioningit loads the package containing the custom method before the package is installed, but importlib.metadata.version() only works after the package is installed.

  • If you generate a conda package from your sdist (e.g., for a conda-forge feedstock), you will likely want to include versioningit as a host dependency in your conda meta.yaml file. This is needed for the package produced from your sdist to contain the correct version number in its dist-info.

Backwards Compatibility Policy

versioningit follows Semantic Versioning, in which the major version component is incremented whenever a breaking change is made. Moreover, the basic pyproject.toml interface to versioningit can be considered very stable; the only changes to expect to it will be the addition of new features and the occasional patching over of corner-case bugs. Nearly all breaking changes will be to the library or custom method API; if you’ve written any code that uses this part of the API, you are advised to declare the next major version of versioningit as an upper bound on your versioningit dependency.

Bug fixes may, on occasion, be backported to previous major versions of versioningit, but this is in general unlikely to happen unless a user specifically requests it.