Installing zulip-term in Python 3.10 fallbacks to zulip-term 0.2.1

[JPTIZ]

As previously mentioned in #1143, newer versions of zulip installed through pip fail to start due to the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
    return self.do_api_query(marshalled_request, versioned_url, method=method,
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 501, in do_api_query
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulipterminal/cli/run.py", line 123, in main
    Controller(zuliprc_path, zterm['theme']).main()
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 618, in call_endpoint
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulipterminal/core.py", line 30, in __init__
    self.model = Model(self)
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulipterminal/model.py", line 40, in __init__
    self._update_initial_data()
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 447, in ensure_session
    session.headers.update({"User-agent": self.get_user_agent()})
    self.ensure_session()
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 447, in ensure_session
    return self.do_api_query(marshalled_request, versioned_url, method=method,
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulipterminal/model.py", line 159, in _update_initial_data
    raise urwid.ExitMainLoop()
    session.headers.update({"User-agent": self.get_user_agent()})
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 463, in get_user_agent
    session.headers.update({"User-agent": self.get_user_agent()})
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 463, in get_user_agent
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 501, in do_api_query
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 463, in get_user_agent
    vendor, vendor_version, dummy = platform.linux_distribution()
    vendor, vendor_version, dummy = platform.linux_distribution()
AttributeError: module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution'
urwid.main_loop.ExitMainLoop
AttributeError: module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution'
    self.ensure_session()
    vendor, vendor_version, dummy = platform.linux_distribution()
Zulip Terminal has crashed!
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 447, in ensure_session
AttributeError: module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution'
You can ask for help at:
    session.headers.update({"User-agent": self.get_user_agent()})
  File "/home/jptiz/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/zulip/__init__.py", line 463, in get_user_agent
https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/206-zulip-terminal

---

Some debugging

Looking at the end of installation log, zulip-term-0.2.1 is installed instead of 0.6.0:

$ pip install zulip-term
...
Installing collected packages: urwid, typing, zulip, urwid-readline, emoji, zulip-term
Successfully installed emoji-0.5.0 typing-3.6.4 urwid-2.0.1 urwid-readline-0.7 zulip-0.4.7 zulip-term-0.2.1

Getting the 0.6.0 .whl file and building it manually shows that 0.6.0 is incompatible with Python 3.10:

$ pip wheel zulip_term-0.6.0+git-py3-none-any.whl
Processing ./zulip_term-0.6.0+git-py3-none-any.whl
...
ERROR: Package 'zulip-term' requires a different Python: 3.10.1 not in '<3.10,>=3.6'

Which might be the cause, maybe it is falling back to a previous version which apparently didn't had any Python restrictions (at least checking 0.2.0 tagged commit's file tree).

[neiljp]

@JPTIZ Thanks for reporting this!

Your debugging seems accurate to me 👍 We don't (cannot?) say that we are compatible with future python versions, in the releases we make.

To summarize:

• As you say, 0.6.0 itself is specified as incompatible with 3.10
• At some published version we started supporting a specific range of python versions, which seems to be as far back as at least 0.3.1, but is not in 0.2.0
• 0.2.1 was released, though I don't see a tag for it in the git log, and presumably didn't have a python constraint, so is likely the latest released version which is "compatible" with Python 3.10

Note that we extended support in main to a pre-release of 3.10 at the end of August with CI testing, and updated to 3.10 later, so the development branch in git should support 3.10 just fine - or at least as far as we know based on tests, since I'm not sure how much direct manual testing with that version it's received.

Are you using 3.10 with the main branch installed at the moment? Have things performed broadly OK?

I'm not sure how we can fix this for future python versions unless we avoid early versions from installing from pypi, though this is definitely an issue for the next release!

[JPTIZ]

@JPTIZ Thanks for reporting this!

Your debugging seems accurate to me +1 We don't (cannot?) say that we are compatible with future python versions, in the releases we make.

And I agree, from a stability point of view at least. It is a safe decision that can rely on tools like pyenv if a prior Python version is needed to run zulip, although I would also agree if the decision was to accept newer versions until there is a stated breaking-change on a newer Python's release notes (e.g. when async was introduced as a keyword, which broke scripts where it was a variable name), as Python should have some level of backward compatibility.

...

Are you using 3.10 with the main branch installed at the moment? Have things performed broadly OK?

I'm not sure how we can fix this for future python versions unless we avoid early versions from installing from pypi, though this is definitely an issue for the next release!

Everything ok for now, didn't have any issues at all, or at least no new issues. All issues I have are known issues that I already had on Py3.9, such as the negative message count bug, eventual (sort of rare) freezes when writing on private messages and not being able to send private messages to someone who has accents (~) on its name. No crashes or any new problem emerging from Py3.10.

[neiljp]

@JPTIZ Just a note to say I've mentioned this issue in the documentation in #1159 and plan to close this after merging, using this for reference only.

I'm not sure if you're on chat.zulip.org (in which case I'd be happy to chat in #zulip-terminal or elsewhere), but otherwise I'd be interested to hear briefly here about anything which we don't have in a reported issue, which sounds like it could include accents on names? If there's a way we could improve that behavior that would be great; does that occur in the web app or mobile?

[JPTIZ]

I'm not sure if you're on chat.zulip.org (in which case I'd be happy to chat in #zulip-terminal or elsewhere),

Now I am :)

but otherwise I'd be interested to hear briefly here about anything which we don't have in a reported issue, which sounds like it could include accents on names? If there's a way we could improve that behavior that would be great; does that occur in the web app or mobile?

Didn't try on mobile, but web-app works pretty fine. On zulip-terminal, though, it says it couldn't find user named <name of the person that has accents ("~" in my case) in its name>. Of course, it might be another thing, but the only difference I could notice was the accent on the "target" user of the message. As I have a accent in my chat.zulip.org username, we could try to test this there.

This and the miscounting of unread messages are the only issues I have currently.

[neiljp]

@JPTIZ I think I found you on #zulip-terminal, and started a new topic in there about the accent issue, so please do drop in :)

I'm going to close this now, since I've merged #1159.