Synchronizing Jeweler's gem version with version string in program itself

So I'm using Jeweler to maintain a little gem of mine, and it provides a set of handy rake version:* tasks for managing the version number. Jeweler apparently stores the version number in a file called VERSION, which is then read on rake gemspec. The only problem is, the actual Ruby code in the library also contains a version, which is eg. sent out in HTTP request headers created by the library:

module MediaWiki
  class << self
    def version
      "0.1.6"
    end
    .开发者_开发问答..

Any ideas for keeping these two in sync automatically? Alternatively, is there some way the MediaWiki library can query the gem it was turned into to find its own version?

---

Why don't you have the version method return a constant?

# lib/media_wiki/version.rb
module MediaWiki
  VERSION = "1.0.6"
end

# lib/media_wiki.rb (or wherever)
module MediaWiki
  class << self
    def version
      MediaWiki::VERSION
    end
  end
end

EDIT (in response to comment):

Also you have to update your Rakefile to use the constant:

# Rakefile
Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gemspec|
  ...
  gemspec.version     = MediaWiki::VERSION
  ...
end

Peer