latest version of pvfactors cannot be installed with pvlib 0.10.0 #1796
Description
The last several versions of pvfactors require pvlib<0.10 to preempt possible breaking changes. In fact this turned out to be unnecessary; to the best of my knowledge, there is no actual incompatibility between pvfactors==1.5.2 (the latest) and pvlib==0.10.0.
However, that upper limit does prevent pip from installing pvfactors==1.5.2 and pvlib==0.10.0 simultaneously. What it does instead is go back to pvfactors==1.4.1, the last version that doesn't require pvlib<0.10. The problem is that this version of pvfactors is old enough to not contain a compatibility fix with the latest shapely, resulting in a broken installation that errors when you try to actually use pvfactors. See for example this failed docs build: https://readthedocs.org/projects/pvlib-python/builds/21171307/
Users have two options to work around this problem in the immediate term. Option 1: downgrade shapely to a version that works with pvfactors==1.4.1:
$ pip install pvlib==0.10.0 pvfactors # installs pvfactors 1.4.1 and shapely 2.x
$ pip install 'shapely<2.0' # might need to use double quotes in some terminalsOption 2: tell pip to ignore pvfactors when it says it isn't compatible with pvlib 0.10.0. This will allow you to keep using pvfactors 1.5.2:
$ pip install pvfactors==1.5.2 # installs pvlib 0.9.5, and shapely 1.8.5
$ pip install --no-deps pvlib==0.10.0 # installs pvlib 0.10.0 alongside pvfactors 1.5.2For a more permanent fix, the best solution would be for pvfactors to release a new version that doesn't have this unnecessary pvlib<0.10 requirement. But since that project is no longer maintained, we can't expect that to happen.
In the absence of that, I see two options, both of which require going to 0.10.1:
- A simple solution would be to add
shapely<2.0to ouroptionalrequirements, effectively making Option 1 above automatic. This has the downside of using an older version of pvfactors, which is missing a minor bugfix that a small minority of users might care about. - Another option is to use this as motivation to get solarfactors sufficiently up to speed such that we could switch pvlib to depend on it instead of pvfactors. I will look into how much work that would take.
An aside: although I did make a local v0.10.0 tag and ensure that the tests passed before making the official 0.10.0 release, I neglected to install pvlib[optional] in the fresh test environment, so the pvfactors tests were skipped and this problem did not arise. Had I been more thorough, this problem could have been found out before pvlib 0.10.0 was actually released.