Take a dictionary instead of a file

[aw-was-here]

It would be fantastic if there was a way to replace copyright. Given the limitations of the version field, it is useful to stuff that field with more information at build-time. Thanks!

[DudeNr33]

Can you please give a concrete example of what you want to achieve? Copyright itself can be set in the YAML file with LegalCopyright. Do you want to set this value from the command line?

[aw-was-here]

I'm actually directly calling pyinstaller_versionfile.create_file_version.MetaData as an API so that I can set things programmatically when pyinstaller runs. But it just occurred to me that what I probably need to do is send an IO steam that contains my content rather than have a file on the side.

[DudeNr33]

I will take a look at this - so for you it would be enough if the MetaData class would accept a file-like object instead of a filepath?

[aw-was-here]

With a bit more playing, with the 1.0.2 version, this hack demonstrates what I'm looking to do.

[aw-was-here]

So really: rather than taking a raw file or a stream, taking a structure would be much more flexible.

[DudeNr33]

@aw-was-here I pushed a update to the develop branch. For issue #6 I wanted to separate the input of the metadata and creation of the output file anyway, and this should now also make what you want to do straightforward, as you can just create your own MetaData object directly.

Here would be a minimal example:

from pyinstaller_versionfile.metadata import MetaData
from pyinstaller_versionfile.writer import Writer

metadata = MetaData(version="1.2.3.4", legal_copyright="My Imaginary Company")  # all parameters are optional, just specify what you need
writer = Writer(metadata)
writer.render()
writer.save("versionfile.txt")

Would this solve your problem? Note: this new version would become a V2.0.0 and will also drop support for Python < 3.6.

[aw-was-here]

Would this solve your problem?

@DudeNr33 Just tried out the develop branch: yes! definitely! This change makes it much easier to incorporate into the build.

Two things probably worth mentioning:

1) It looks like version validation/fixing isn't actually happening with < 4 digits. I'd expect either a ValueError exception or for the code to just automatically fix version if it isn't 4 decimal places. e.g.:

metadata = MetaData(version='1.2.3', ...)

ends up being

filevers=(1,2,3),

which is obviously wrong.

2) This usage feels awkward, given I'm not sure what else I'd use the Writer object for:

writer = Writer(metadata)
writer.render()
writer.save("versionfile.txt")

Should save() just call render()? Should render() return the rendered text as well? Or perhaps you have other plans already and it will make more sense later. :+1:

Note: this new version would become a V2.0.0 and will also drop support for Python < 3.6.

That's fine for me. I've already got code that requires 3.8 in use.

Thanks!

[DudeNr33]

Thank you for your feedback!

Ad 1) The MetaData class has two additional methods, that you may call from your calling code:

• validate() - checks for invalid input. A version with less than 4 decimal places is not considered invalid, as the second method would take care of that:
• sanitize() - sanitizes the input, i.e. trimming whitespace and filling a version with less than four places with zeros.

I considered calling both methods directly in the __init__ method of the class. But I thought that if somebody imports and uses the code directly, he would probably also like a bit more control over what is happening, so I decided against it.

Ad 2) render() takes care of rendering the output and handling rendering errors. save() takes care of the saving the file and handling I/O errors. I found it cleaner to separate those concerns into individual methods.

I think both issues could be addressed by providing a functional API in the __init__.py of the package, which would essentially implement the logic currently in main.py:main() for the two cases of file-based input and dictionary (or keyword arguments) input.

# __init__.py

def create_versionfile(version, company_name, ..., outfile):
    metadata = MetaData(version, company_name, ...)
    metadata.validate()
    metadata.sanitize()
    writer = Writer(metadata)
    writer.render()
    writer.save(outfile)

def create_versionfile_from_file(infile, outfile, version=None):
    metadata = MetaData.from_file(infile)
    metadata.validate()
    if version:
        metadata.set_version(version)
    metadata.sanitize()
    writer = Writer(metadata)
    writer.render()
    writer.save(outfile)

This would at least save you from calling all methods yourself in the correct order. Having a second opinion is always great, so fell free to let me know what you think.

[aw-was-here]

That all looks fantastic. Combined with pyinstaller taking the version file as a parameter these changes make it all very easy to do now.

Thanks!

[DudeNr33]

V2.0.0 is now available on PyPI. Check the updated readme for the final function signature. 👍

[aw-was-here]

Thanks!