Bump starting_version for setuptools-git-versioning for new releases

[xylar]

Requirements

• Reviewed ESMPy Documentation
• Searched GitHub Discussions

Affiliation(s)

LANL

ESMF Version

v8.8.0

Issue

In ESMPy 8.8.0, the starting_version for setuptools-git-versioning:
https://github.com/esmf-org/esmf/blob/v8.8.0/src/addon/esmpy/pyproject.toml#L40
was not set to 8.8.0 but remained 8.8.0beta.

When the esmpy conda package gets built from source, the Git tag is not available so it has to resort back to this "starting_version". See:
https://setuptools-git-versioning.readthedocs.io/en/stable/schemas/file/index.html

As a result, it things internally that it is version 8.0.0b0, resulting in warnings like the following any time ESMPy is imported:

/lcrc/soft/climate/e3sm-unified/base/envs/e3sm_unified_1.11.0rc7_chrysalis/lib/python3.10/site-packages/esmpy/interface/loadESMF.py:94: VersionWarning: ESMF installation version 8.8.0, ESMPy version 8.8.0b0
  warnings.warn("ESMF installation version {}, ESMPy version {}".format(

There doesn't seem to be a way short of patching the code to fix this during packaging (e.g. it cannot be overridden by an environment variable). So it would be nice for the 8.9.0 release to make sure this variable gets set to the proper release value.

Autotag

@billsacks

[billsacks]

Thanks for this note, @xylar . We noticed this issue in the ESMPy documentation for the 8.8 release, but didn't realize that it also impacted the conda installation of ESMPy. Is the issue that the conda workflow doesn't get ESMF / ESMPy via a git clone, but instead via some other mechanism?

[xylar]

Correct, it get ESMF and ESMPy from the .tar.gz source code, not from a clone. In general, setuptools-git-versioning is a pain for us because many developers don't handle the fallback correctly. I don't think it's really very useful myself. I would prefer that the source just have the right version hard-coded in it.

[billsacks]

I have made sure that updating this version is on our release procedure for the future. (All of these manual things are a bit error-prone, but it seems like there isn't a good way around this.)

[xylar]

Thank you!