setuptool-scm for Debian ------------------------ You may have problems packaging upstream software that use this package for their versioning, since setuptools-scm will not have access to the git repository when building. You may get errors like: LookupError: setuptools-scm was unable to detect version for '/tmp/build-area/gentoo-1.0'. Debian's Python build toolchain supports setuptools-scm with dh_python (>= 2.20160609~). Make sure you enable `pybuild` in your `debian/rules` file, for example: %: dh $@ --with=python2,sphinxdoc --buildsystem=pybuild On older versions of dh_python, you can manually override the version number using the `SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION` variable. For example, this will pull the version from the upstream PKG-INFO file: export SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION=$(shell cat PKG-INFO | sed -n 's/^Version: //p') This will pull the version from the `debian/changelog` file: export SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION=$(shell dpkg-parsechangelog -S version) setuptools-scm can also be used to generate a file that will contain version numbers with the `write_to` parameter, as such: use_scm_version={ 'write_to': '_version.py', }, -- Antoine Beaupré , Wed, 5 Oct 2016 13:34:36 -0400