[Bug] Python client no longer able to use version from file RELEASE-VERSION

[jdblischak]

PR #2563 was merged Thursday. It updated version.py to improve the auto-generated versions for the Python package. However, this seems to have broken the package build workflow that relies on obtaining the version from the file RELEASE-VERSION instead of the Git repository.

The nightly jobs that build wheels from an sdist (which has RELEASE-VERSION bundled with it) are failing because version.py is running a Git command which fails in this context with no Git repository

xref: #2578 (comment), #2583, #2584, #2585

subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '('git', 'tag', '--list', '--sort=v:refname', '[0-9].*.*')' returned non-zero exit status 128.

note to self: this scheduled job runs at 5:44 AM each day, which is why the job passed on Thursday and the first failure was Friday morning

The nightly tiledbsoma-feedstock builds are failing with a similar albeit different error:

xref: TileDB-Inc/tiledbsoma-feedstock#153 (comment)

    File "${SRC_DIR}/apis/python/version.py", line 124, in get_latest_remote_tag
      raise RuntimeError(f"No tags found in remote {remote}")
  RuntimeError: No tags found in remote origin

The conda recipe build script creates RELEASE-VERSION using the version specified in the recipe (source): echo "$PKG_VERSION" >> RELEASE-VERSION

Frustratingly my packaging CI job didn't catch this. Even though I build from an sdist, I unpacked it within the Git repository, so version.py was still able to successfully run Git commands. I'll update the pipeline to be more rigorous.

[ryan-williams]

I dispatched a "sdist & wheel" GHA here, from main, now that #2590 is merged; I expect it to pass, and the daily to go green tmrw.

lmk if there's anything else I should look at here @jdblischak, and apologies for breaking this build!

[ryan-williams]

Confirming: scheduled "sdist & wheel" GHA passed today https://github.com/single-cell-data/TileDB-SOMA/actions/runs/9172528963

[jdblischak]

I confirmed that this is also now fixed in the nightly build of tiledbsoma-feedstock. The one currently passing build was able to run version.py without a problem. Note that the nightly feedstock build is a bit different since it clones the Git repo, but presumably the standard build with the GitHub release tarball will also work since we fixed the wheel from sdist builds.