The setuptools version requirement causes us to stay with using 0.13

[Canol]

Hello, this is just a feedback about an issue we experienced which caused our internal tools stack to stay with xarray 0.13 version instead of a newer versions.

We are a company using xarray in our internal frameworks and at the beginning we didn't have any restrictions on xarray version in our requirements file, so that new installations of our framework were using the latest version of xarray. But a few months ago we started to hear complaints from users who were having problems with installing our framework and the installation was failing because of xarray's requirement to use at least setuptools 41.2 which is released on 21th of August last year. So it hasn't been a year since it got released which might be considered relatively new.

During the installation of our framework, pip was failing to update setuptools by saying that some other process is already using setuptools files so it cannot update setuptools. The people who are using our framework are not software developers so they didn't know how to solve this problem and it became so overwhelming for us maintainers that we set the xarray requirement to version >=0.13 <0.14. We also share our internal framework with customers of our company so we didn't want to bother the customers with any potential problems.

You can see some other people having having similar problem when trying to update setuptools here (although not related to xarray): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49338652/pip-install-u-setuptools-fail-windows-10

It is not a big deal but I just wanted to give this as a feedback. I don't know how much xarray depends on setuptools' 41.2 version.

Regards,

Canol

[Canol]

A correction: the setuptools requirement of xarray is introduced with 0.15.1 so we stay with 0.15 as the highest version not 0.13.

Regards,

Canol

[Stephan Hoyer]

Hi Canol,

Thanks for the report. I don't think we intended to require such a new version of setuptools to install xarray, which I agree is unduly restrictive.

I opened an GitHub issue to discuss possible solutions:

https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4295

Best,

Stephan

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[Chris Barker]

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 11:24 AM Stephan Hoyer <sho...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the report. I don't think we intended to require such a new version of setuptools to install xarray, which I agree is unduly restrictive.

This is really a pip / setuptools bug, but if it can be avoided in xarray, then great.

In fact, I think these days that setuptools can be pretty much counted on, so may not need a requirement at all.

However, while setuptools is mostly used for building/installing, it does have some run-time features as well, and so may be a run-time requirement. Which is a major flaw in setuptools' design, the mingling of build-time, install-time and run-time features is really ugly. And why this issue comes up -- I think the problem is that setuptools is being used by pip to install xarray, so it can't upgrade setuptools while being installed.

Anyway, if xarray doesn't need it at runtime, then just get rid of the dependency, if it does, then making it as old a version as possible would help.

Final note to the OP: You might consider using conda to distribute your tools. It better supports the whole "scipy / data science" stack anyway, and it also does a better job of cleanly separating build, install, and run time actions. So it would have no problem upgrading setuptools when installing xarray.

-CHB

 

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 7:03 AM Canol <canol...@gmail.com> wrote:

A correction: the setuptools requirement of xarray is introduced with 0.15.1 so we stay with 0.15 as the highest version not 0.13.

Regards,

Canol

On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 12:06:08 PM UTC+2, Canol wrote:

Hello, this is just a feedback about an issue we experienced which caused our internal tools stack to stay with xarray 0.13 version instead of a newer versions.

We are a company using xarray in our internal frameworks and at the beginning we didn't have any restrictions on xarray version in our requirements file, so that new installations of our framework were using the latest version of xarray. But a few months ago we started to hear complaints from users who were having problems with installing our framework and the installation was failing because of xarray's requirement to use at least setuptools 41.2 which is released on 21th of August last year. So it hasn't been a year since it got released which might be considered relatively new.

During the installation of our framework, pip was failing to update setuptools by saying that some other process is already using setuptools files so it cannot update setuptools. The people who are using our framework are not software developers so they didn't know how to solve this problem and it became so overwhelming for us maintainers that we set the xarray requirement to version >=0.13 <0.14. We also share our internal framework with customers of our company so we didn't want to bother the customers with any potential problems.

You can see some other people having having similar problem when trying to update setuptools here (although not related to xarray): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49338652/pip-install-u-setuptools-fail-windows-10

It is not a big deal but I just wanted to give this as a feedback. I don't know how much xarray depends on setuptools' 41.2 version.

Regards,

Canol

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