Core has a config variable log_pywiki_repo_version = False . That could be useful for T98106

Regarding the user-agent, core http layer provides a few values to the user agent formatter, including pywikibot.release (which is not the auto discovered version), but also includes the auto-discovered data in pywikibot.version.cache only if it is set. (see http.py line 184). That implicitly means it doesnt use the git version when log_pywiki_repo_version is False

We could improve the user agent so that it explicitly fetches pywikibot.version data when '{revision}' or '{version}' are in the user agent format string, and explicitly doesnt fetch that version when those are omitted from the user agent string.

But when it generates the user agent string in core it doesn't fetch the version of pwb. So it seems unrelated to the user agent string.

Anyway we could use some classes or so which have a __str__ and lazy load the version number. So if there is no {version} in the string str.format won't do str(…) on that:

>>> class Test:
...     def __str__(self):
...         print('str')
...         return 'version-number'
... 
>>> '{test}'.format(test=Test())
str
'version-number'
>>> '{foo}'.format(test=Test(), foo=42)
'42'
>>> '{test}: {foo}'.format(test=Test(), foo=42)
str
'version-number: 42'

Okay with 65450196 merged not adding {version} and {revision} to the user-agent format string it won't query the version number. So the question is what this bug report is about and if it actually did fix this bug (for pywikibot-core).

1241b574 introduced a new usage of version.getversiondict which cant be disabled.

@saper, are you still using compat?

With regards to https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/208842/ , we could merge it and add config.useragent as a deprecated name of config.user_agent_format. Since compats config.useragent is a literal string, without any substitution, it nearly 100% compatible with cores config.user_agent_format (i.e. as long as it doesnt include any substitution parameters, which would be silly in compat anyway as they would be literal).

Shouldn't it also be possible to have substitution parameters which won't be substituted by doubling the number of brackets (like {{version}} will result in {version}).