Ability to find pythonnet version at runtime / define __version__

Details

• I would like to be able to find out which version of pythonnet is installed in a particular runtime environment from the python side. Most packages define a package.__version__ for that purpose. I couldn’t find anything like that in pythonnet.

I tried

    print(pythonnet.__version__)
    print([v for v in dir(pythonnet) if "version" in v])

I checked on pythonnet==3.0.0rc4.

[filmor]

@amueller Is this really necessary nowadays? Since Python 3.8, there is importlib.metadata.version which will work even when you just do python setup.py build in the local checkout. In the end, I would just use this one to define __version__ as well, just on 3.7 we’d need to fall back to pkg_resources which introduces a runtime dependency on setuptools.

[filmor]

I’d like to adjust the build process to add a version to pythonnet directly, instead. To read the clr version, you have to have initialised the .NET runtime already.