[gt4py] mysterious versions

[dominichofer]

The versions listed here

spack-c2sm/repos/c2sm/packages/py-gt4py/package.py

Lines 19 to 21 in b7e55db

	version('1.1.1', tag='icon4py_20230413', git=url)
	version('1.1.2', tag='icon4py_20230621', git=url)
	version('1.1.3', tag='icon4py_20230817', git=url)

are not released https://github.com/GridTools/gt4py/releases .
This looks like gt4py didn't release these versions to the public, but the package manager spack knows about them. That's odd, isn't it?
Also https://github.com/GridTools/gt4py knows these commits as icon4py_20230413, while spack refers to them as 1.1.2. Why the mismatch? Isn't this confusing?

[dominichofer]

@abishekg7 can you unconfuse me?

[abishekg7]

Basically, gt4py has not have any official releases since v1.0.1 and the gt4py team reserved the numbered tag names for official releases. What we had instead was these temporary tag names. But on the spack side we needed the numbered tag names to allow for easier version management, and hence what you see here.

All this said, we made a tiny error choosing these internal spack version numbers. It should have been v1.0.1.1, v1.0.1.2 instead of 1.1.1 and 1.1.2. @jonasjucker and I were just discussing about changing these version names (to v1.0.1.2 etc) so that when gt4py actually has an 1.0.2 release it won't conflict with our naming.

[dominichofer]

v1.0.1.1, etc makes sense. You could also name them v20230413 to align with the tags if you like.
But still, why does the package manager knows about more versions than the package itself?
If you need more gt4py versions, ask the gt4py people for more versions. If they don't want to commit to them, they can set them as pre-release versions (they will be labeled as non-production ready).
It's not the responsibility of a package manager to fix a versioning problem, that's what version control is for ;-)

[abishekg7]

Fair. For now I'll do the version renaming in a spack PR. But I'll bring it up with the gt4py team re. how to handle these intermediate tags better.

[jonasjucker]

The mysterious version are my bad.
Since gt4py-team did not like to do tags with meaningful semantics I had to do some versioning for spack-c2cm CI.

[dominichofer]

Wait until icon4py uses more stable gt4py versions.