Nuitka doesn't support pkg_resources.get_distribution

Sometimes code will check installed package versions with require or use the version information of installed packages for outputs. For standalone packages that does not work:

__version__ = pkg_resources.get_distribution('requests').version

However, by teaching pkg_resources about our meta path based importer, we could convince it to provide the information even when egg data, etc. has been lost.

The source of the information is easy to get:

env = pkg_resources.Environment()
env.scan()
print(env._distmap)

This produces a dictionary with the information to use to produce Distribution objects at run time.

This apparently mostly does the job, but is bare of robustness:

def get_importer(path_item):
    return sys.meta_path[0]

def my_finder(a,b,c):
    yield pkg_resources.Distribution(project_name = "requests", version = "5")

pkg_resources.register_finder(type(sys.meta_path[0]), my_finder)
pkg_resources.get_importer = get_importer

__version__ = pkg_resources.get_distribution('requests').version

This code could become a post-load for pkg_resources to monkey patch it for finding resources hidden in the meta path based loader. Our meta path based loader should not be assumed to be only one (it is not for Python3 anyway), but directly accessed.

Also maybe it could read the distribution data from disk, to avoid caching issues, and it’s nicer to read that way probably too.

[kayhayen]

It’s automatically enabled.

[kayhayen]

There is a plugin in Nuitka that detects these kinds of version stuff, and resolves them now at compile time to the correct value, avoiding any runtime code, which makes this a solved issue.