I still use m4 for such tasks. I feel like it's only 1 step up from having a sed "s/VERSION/1.2.3/g" in terms of complexity and as long as everything can be don

I still use m4 for such tasks. I feel like it's only 1 step up from having a sed "s/VERSION/1.2.3/g" in terms of complexity and as long as everything can be done with external shell commands, you can avoid installing python, etc.