Local installation from sources - failing due to version not being parsable

I did the following things:

1. Download latest release tar from github here
2. Extracted tar file
3. Ran

python3 setup.py install --prefix=<>

1. Got this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 4, in <module>
    setup(use_scm_version=True)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 145, in setup
    return distutils.core.setup(**attrs)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/distutils/core.py", line 108, in setup
    _setup_distribution = dist = klass(attrs)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 445, in __init__
    _Distribution.__init__(self, {
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/distutils/dist.py", line 292, in __init__
    self.finalize_options()
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 734, in finalize_options
    ep.load()(self, ep.name, value)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools_scm/integration.py", line 17, in version_keyword
    dist.metadata.version = _get_version(config)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools_scm/__init__.py", line 148, in _get_version
    parsed_version = _do_parse(config)
  File "/opt/gnu/9.3.0/python/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/setuptools_scm/__init__.py", line 110, in _do_parse
    raise LookupError(
LookupError: setuptools-scm was unable to detect version for '/home/nicpa/installation/bash-build/.compile/py-3.8/xarray-0.16.0'.

Make sure you're either building from a fully intact git repository or PyPI tarballs. Most other sources (such as GitHub's tarballs, a git checkout without the .git folder) don't contain the necessary metadata and will not work.

For example, if you're using pip, instead of https://github.com/user/proj/archive/master.zip use git+https://github.com/user/proj.git#egg=proj

I think this is because the tar’s created by tagging does not contain the version information anywhere. The setuptools_scm reads versions according to this

As far as I can see, one should create a PKG-INFO with this content:

Version: <version>

I then tried this and then it worked. It would be ideal if the release pages have a fully functional installation procedure. This is mainly useful for non-pip installations etc.

[keewis]

is there a reason why you can’t use the sdist archive from PyPI? I think that archive contains the desired PKG-INFO file.

Edit: I’m not quite sure if we can make github run python setup.py sdist or python -m pep517.build --source . (once we added a pyproject.toml) to generate the tarball.

[keewis]

I guess we can close this; setuptools_scm doesn’t work with archives built using git archive.