Is posix shell or BaSH required to use setup.py?

[mikofski]

I am trying to use duramat/pvpro, and it says in the readme I should have the latest dev branches from solar-data-tools. So I tried to pip install -e ../solar-data-tools from my clone and it crashes on setup.py:L27 presumably b/c I am in a Windows CMD terminal, and so I don't have the tail shell command.

[mikofski]

also, I think versioneer does what you want to do

[mikofski]

or better yet I think what you want is git describe --long:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35522047/pep440-compliant-and-git-describe-info-available-from-deployed-package

$ git describe --long
v0.4.3-6-gda72e35

[bmeyers]

Hi Mark! That advice on installing the dev branch is already stale. Now, PV-Pro (any all other projects) just depends on the current published version, which is v0.4.5 as of this afternoon. So, hopefully your issue is resolved, but please reach out if you have any other problems!

[bmeyers]

By the way, I just put together this repository to try to help people get up and running faster: https://github.com/slacgismo/pvinsight-onboarding

Please let me know if this is useful or if you have any suggestions!

[mikofski]

Hi @bmeyers,

The issue is still there in the setup.py for solar-data-tools

solar-data-tools/setup.py

Line 27 in a22f319

latest_git_tag = subprocess.Popen(['tail', '-1'], stdin=git_tags.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

The problem is that Windows does not have the tail command so you cannot run pip install -e path/to/solar-data-tools. The error is:

FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

I suppose this is only an issue for "developers" who would probably be savvy enough to figure it out on their own, however, it requires them to either use a posix environment like WSL, msys, or git-bash or make changes to the source to install in a pvi-dev conda env on a Windows machine.

My recommendation would be either:

1. change this command to git describe --long

   # get the most recent git tags from the cmd line
   latest_git_tag = subprocess.Popen(['git', 'describe', '--long'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
   latest_version = latest_git_tag.communicate()[0].strip()
   # b'v0.4.3-34-ga22f319'

2. or better yet, just use versioneer. Many projects use versioneer even though these commands seem so simple, but using the same tool standardizes the output. For an example see either pvlib or rdtools

Regarding the new pvinsight-onboarding repo, it looks great. If I have any suggestions, I'll start up a discussion over there. Thanks so much for working on these tools and for putting in extra time to get others up and running. It really makes a difference, and I appreciate your effort!

[bmeyers]

Thank you Mark! We are starting a more concerted effect with additional staffing to work on software development and deployment, expecting to start full effort around May 1, so this is super helpful.