Ensure git archives contains version info

[carlsmedstad]

Using setuptools-scm to resolve the version of a source archive is not possible unless that information is exported during the archival process. This creates issues for downstream packagers as they must manually add version information in their packages or switch to another source.

See https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/#git-archive for more information.

[brandonwillard]

I'm not very familiar with this feature. How would people use it with Aesara?. Nevermind; I see now.

[maresb]

Thanks a lot for pointing this out! Looks like I missed this when I switched over to setuptools_scm. Tentatively it looks good, but I am currently AFK but will try and take a closer look within a day or so. (Feel free to ping me.)

[brandonwillard]

@carlsmedstad, many thanks!

[maresb]

@carlsmedstad, for both my own understanding, and for testing, would you be willing to explain more about your particular use case?

When transitioning to setuptools_scm, I was focused on the PyPI-published sdist. In that case, the version is exported both in the metadata (PKG_INFO) and in aesara/_version.py. Do you have some sort of custom git archive workflow? Or are you using the GitHub-published archive associated with the release? In these cases I see that indeed no version info was being exported, and now that we have this PR, we should probably be testing for this.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

[carlsmedstad]

Your're welcome!

I maintain a few packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) one of which is for Aesara. My preferred packaging workflow is to use the git archive from a GitHub/GitLab release as the source. The main reasons for this is that:

• This source is language agnostic. I maintain software built in Python, Go, C, etc. and would like to reuse as much as possible between packages.
• This works well with Watch -> Custom -> Releases notifications. When I get an email about a new release I know the source for the new version is available.

Hopefully that explains my use case and my reasons for it :)

[maresb]

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation, and also thanks for repackaging Aesara!

I'll make sure to add a test around the git archive, and please do reach out again in case you run into any further issues or have other suggestions.