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by anthonyb 5157 days ago
> it would have know way of understanding that the version was already included within the standard library

Other than by introspecting which packages are installed, that is. Most of them will have a VERSION, __version__ or _version attribute which tells you.
1 comments
jmoiron 5157 days ago
This is available via the pkg-info in all installed packages; iirc version is required for distutils, and there is pep386 for version number format, so it should be possible to determine version number as well as compare them for all well-behaved packages. There is even a package which will find and parse pkg-info for an installed package called pkginfo:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pkginfo

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anthonyb 5157 days ago
GP was talking about built in modules in the standard library. I don't think they use distutils, but many of them still have some sort of version number.
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