I renamed the dir back to forrestv-p2pool-7aedd00 and then, to accommodate my script which starts p2pool, made a soft link to it named p2pool. That script contains "python ~/src/p2pool/run_p2pool.py". There's still no version output.
[I recognize that this issue is quite trivial and will cheerfully accept lack of a reply.]
P2Pool uses the argv[0] (the path that you give to run_p2pool.py) to find its directory, so it's looking at "~/src/p2pool", and the symlink does nothing. I think it would make most sense to rename it to p2pool_8.2 and run p2pool as "python ~/src/p2pool_8.2/run_p2pool.py". (: