Replace pkg_resources with importlib.metadata #137
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pkg_resources is deprecated in favor of importlib.metadata (https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html). Due to its caching behaviour, using pkg_resources causes errors on google colab (huggingface/transformers#10964), which switching to importlib.metadata solves. For version before 3.8, the importlib-metadata package provides an official backport.
| if sys.version_info[:2] >= (3, 8): | ||
| import importlib.metadata as importlib_metadata | ||
| else: | ||
| import importlib_metadata | ||
|
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Another option here is to just catch the ImportError (and you wouldn't need to import sys)
| if sys.version_info[:2] >= (3, 8): | |
| import importlib.metadata as importlib_metadata | |
| else: | |
| import importlib_metadata | |
| try: | |
| import importlib.metadata as importlib_metadata | |
| except ImportError: | |
| import importlib_metadata |
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I'd prefer not to swallow any exceptions
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Fair enough! Suggested because it's a fairly common pattern (there's an except ImportError in this file already).
A totally different (over-the-top) solution to this issue would be to rewrite the packaging to use setup.cfg and pyproject.toml files, at which point setup.py is no longer necessary and the version can be stored as a literal in this file (setup.cfg can read it). I only learned how to do this yesterday, so I'm mad with power. 😂
edit: although this is a relatively new feature of setuptools and might not work well in all environments, so maybe it's better to wait on that.
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Personally, I'm all for switching everything to PEP 621 and reading metadata through importlib.metadata, but for now I guess __version__ and importlib_metadata will have to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
pkg_resources was causing errors when using our package on google colab due to its internal caching (sacdallago/bio_embeddings#160, sacdallago/bio_embeddings#123), so I've replaced it with importlib.metadata. I've done the same change before for huggingface/transformers (ttps://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/10964). Also note that pkg_resources is deprecated in favor of importlib.metadata (https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html). For python versions older than 3.8, I'm using the official importlib-metadata backport.