How to dynamically get name, version and other info from a Python app at runtime

Question

I'm writing an Python app that makes use of a Gtk.AboutDialog. Some of the information shown in the dialog comes from setting properties for bits of info I've just given elsewhere, and I'd like to avoid duplication.

For instance, in the code:

about = Gtk.AboutDialog()
about.set_program_name("Qreator")
about.set_version('0.1')

The program name and the version are already specified in setup.py (I'm using python-distutils-extra as the build system).

So is there a way to extract that information at runtime (be it from setup.py or somewhere else), so that I don't have to manually specify it again?

Answer 1

You can place a constants.py for example, in the python package for your program, and define the values there, instead of in setup.py. You can then import that module from setup.py or the code which shows the about dialog, and set the appropriate values from the appropriate constants.