The wrong VERSION file can be read on a system with several kolibri installations

Observed behavior

Seems this happens with the .pex:

python3 code/kolibri/dist/kolibri-0.7.1b1.dev+git-2-gfd48a7a.pex --version
WARNING:root:No C Extensions available for this platform.

0.7.1b1

I have that version installed as a system-wide Python module from the .deb, so it seems that the VERSION file in the .pex is overruled.

python3
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 23 2017, 16:37:01) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pkgutil
>>> pkgutil.get_data('kolibri', 'VERSION').decode('utf-8')
'0.7.1b1\n'

Implementation looks like this

def get_version_file():
    """
    Looks for a file VERSION in the package data and returns the contents in
    this. Does not check consistency.
    """
    return pkgutil.get_data('kolibri', 'VERSION').decode('utf-8')

Expected behavior

Use VERSION file from Pex

User-facing consequences

Confusion

Errors and logs

…

Steps to reproduce

See above

Context

After https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri/pull/3136 is merged

[indirectlylit]

I’d prefer not to delay 0.7.1 for this

[benjaoming]

Cannot reproduce on a system with a system-wide Kolibri installed.

➜  ~ ./kolibri-0.13.2b1.dev0_git.96.g348dfbb1.pex --version
INFO     Option RUN_MODE in section [Deployment] being overridden by environment variable KOLIBRI_RUN_MODE
kolibri-0.13.2b1.dev0_git.96.g348dfbb1.pex, version 0.13.2b1.dev0+git.96.g348dfbb1