Backport PR #15473: Ensure tables with masked and unmasked columns roundtrip properly (v5.0.x)

[mhvk]

Manual backport of #15473 onto v5.0.x

[pllim]

You need the skip basebranch check label. I will close/reopen again.

[pllim]

Thanks!

[pllim]

Hmm @mhvk , does pyerfa not provide wheel for this?

  Collecting pyerfa>=2.0 (from astropy==5.0.9.dev29+g7efa256707)
    Downloading pyerfa-2.0.1.tar.gz (817 kB)
       ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 817.3/817.3 kB 78.1 MB/s eta 0:00:00
    Installing build dependencies: started
    Installing build dependencies: finished with status 'error'

[mhvk]

Hmm, that's weird, I thought that with our new scheme we have wheels that are good for all python/numpy versions... Maybe this takes some time? I restarted the CI run just in case. @astrofrog, do you know whether there is a delay in pyerfa wheel building, or whether they for some reason would not work with astropy 5.0?

[astrofrog]

Which job is not using PyERFA wheels?

[pllim]

cp39-manylinux_x86_64 wheels

[pllim]

Maybe it is not compatible with your abi3 wheels (https://pypi.org/project/pyerfa/2.0.1/#files). This branch still uses oldest-supported-numpy and have this pin:

astropy/setup.cfg

Line 31 in 8bb0d7d

numpy>=1.18,<1.25

In the event it cannot find wheel, it tries to build pyerfa from source but now pyerfa needs numpy>=1.25,<2 to build (https://github.com/liberfa/pyerfa/blob/1903739c3e971938c4b4e0e4994d3e3f6039ba71/pyproject.toml#L6).

Does this mean we need to pin pyerfa<2.0.1 in this branch?

[mhvk]

Maybe we should relax the numpy constraint to build pyerfa from source? Pyerfa itself does not require that at all. If it is there just for wheel-building, then perhaps the constraint should be moved to that part (somehow).

[mhvk]

p.s. Given that 5.0 is almost at its end, pinning pyerfa may be reasonable too. But personally I prefer to remove the numpy constraint in pyerfa; it build perfectly fine for older numpy.

[pllim]

I don't think we can if I understood the conversation here correctly.

• Build: Replace oldest-supported-numpy #14949

[pllim]

At any rate, I think this backport should go in. So merging. Thanks!

[mhvk]

See liberfa/pyerfa#119 for a place to discuss how to ensure we can at least build pyerfa from source with all supported numpy versions.