lalsuite > 6.70 wheels requiring pip > 18 or so
@duncanmmacleod @adam-mercer @leo-singer I've known about this for a while and just worked around it, but I think I never properly reported it. When running old pip versions (I know at least 18 is still too old, 20 is good enough, haven't checked for the exact point of divergence), one can only get an outdated lalsuite version, 6.70, nothing newer. Explicitly asking for newer versions results in "No matching distribution".
I was wondering
- if anyone knows why this is? I didn't find anything explicitly setting a minimum pip version in https://git.ligo.org/lscsoft/lalsuite/-/blob/master/wheel/setup.py.in so it must probably be some implicit feature dependence - it might also be no coincidence that whatever it is happened between 6.70 and 6.71, with 6.71 being the version which had the problems in #340 (closed).
- if we can do anything about it in the sense of supporting the old pip versions again (probably not)?
- if we can warn users about it somehow? We could write something at https://pypi.org/project/lalsuite/ but I guess most users only use the commandline and never see that page. Still might be a good idea.
If the answers are "no idea, no, no", then in the end that's also ok, since pip already does a good job of bugging users to update after each and every command; still, not everyone may then actually retry installing lal, so if anyone has an idea at least for 3, that would be nice.
Steps to reproduce (exact versions will depend on the system, this is on ARCCA which like CIT has a really ancient pip pre-installed, but as mentioned above it still happens with much newer versions):
$ python3 -m venv test-venv
$ source test-venv/bin/activate
$ pip --version
pip 9.0.3 from /nfshome/store02/users/david.keitel/test-venv/lib64/python3.6/site-packages (python 3.6)
$ pip install lalsuite
$ pip list | grep lalsuite
[...]
lalsuite (6.70)
$ pip install --upgrade lalsuite==6.72
[...]
No matching distribution found for lalsuite==6.72
$ pip install --upgrade pip
pip 20.2.1 from /nfshome/store02/users/david.keitel/test-astropy/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/pip (python 3.6)
$ pip install --upgrade lalsuite
[...]
Successfully installed importlib-resources-3.0.0 lalsuite-6.75 zipp-3.1.0