Until we find a more robust solution, I just merged the suggestion (to add 'setuptools_scm' as a dependency of 'pyerfa' and 'extension-helpers') to the main 'maneage' branch (as part of some other small fixes) in Commit 644a236b7.

From the discussions we had here, this is not a stable fix so I am not closing this bug. But since it decreases the number of occurrences, it was merged with that commit.

Although commit 2b02ded seems to work as a workaround (a very crude workaround), there's a more systematic solution based on #python community recommendations. This is based on 'python setup.py bdist_wheel'; I'll add comments about this in a few minutes at task #16268 [1]. So I recommend not to use 2b02ded (it's not elegant and no longer needed).

The (modular) bdist_wheel commit that I now recommend, and that worked for me on Debian 11.5 and CentOS 7, is d5775fa. The more practical commit for testing is 394eee2, which first includes cherry-picked 7286ad6 (cherry-picked ID dfa4758; for ncurses for python; bug #61271); 67daeee (cherry-picked ID f53729f; pyyaml update to 6.0 to solve bug #61811); and ab7303c (cherry-picked ID f161328; for extension-helpers and 'packaging'; also in bug #61811); then d577fa itself is the commit for bdist_wheel; and finally 'astropy' is enabled so that commit 394eee2 functions as a test. My earlier (horrible) pyerfa workaound is not included in 394eee2. See the branch 'bdist_wheel' [2] for all these commits, e.g. the modular commit d5775fa, or the testable combined commit 394eee2.

Testing on Darwin/xnu (and other systems) would be nice. :)

[1] https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?16268

[2] https://codeberg.org/boud/maneage_dev/src/branch/bdist_wheel

I have now reproduced the bug: 'pyerfa' fails with an error that 'packaging' is missing, even though 'packaging' is a dependency of 'pyerfa' in 'python.mk'.

Commit 1333c1b1 proposed below by Raúl is not enough for my run: I got the above fatal error while including setuptools_scm as a prerequisite for pyerfa .

I'm currently trying a workaround, since 'packaging' was installed on this particular Maneage system about an hour before 'pyerfa' needed it, so this is probably something subtle related to pyerfa's 'setup.py' file and the various python 'os', 'sys' and 'setuptools' packages work...

Thanks Mohammad. I have pushed a commit so you can easily try it. Just don't forget to add 'astropy' as a final Python target to be built.

https://gitlab.com/maneage/project-dev/-/commit/a9eac928

In my case, none of the problems described in bug #61811 happened. However, a new one appeared: 'numpy' complaining about not finding 'cython'! So, it would be a new case for bug #61811. Let me know how it goes in your case.

I will try to check more things in the mean time. Maybe adding 'setuptools_scm' as a prerequisite of all problematic packages? Let's see.

maybe you are right! I have been looking at that. The only thing I have found is this line in the 'setup.py' file of 'extension-helpers':

setup(use_scm_version={'write_to': os.path.join('extension_helpers', 'version.py')})

I tried to reproduce that problem but since it is not a reproducible bug I couldn't. In any case I can also add 'setuptools_scm' as a prerequisite of 'extension-helpers' and let the users try if they get the same problem. What do you think?

Until now, 'setuptools_scm' was not a prerequisite of 'pyerfa'. It is strange that we didn't notice this until now because 'pyerfa' is also a requisite of 'astropy'. In any case, I faced an installation crash after updating the Maneage branch of one project and I found this issue.

With the commit below, 'setuptools_scm' has been set as a prerequisite of 'pyerfa'. Now the installation of 'pyerfa' is done without any problem. Check it and merge if you consider that everything is good.

https://gitlab.com/maneage/project-dev/-/commit/1333c1b1