Intermittent Build Issues Caused by `datetime.now()` in `setup.py`

[andrej]

I believe the following line, which makes the wheel build nondeterministic, is causing some intermittent build failures for us:

mlir-python-extras/setup.py

Line 58 in d7e1b88

now = datetime.now()

My understanding is that pip calls setup.py twice. Once to get metadata about the package (and resolve dependencies), and then later again to build the wheel. If enough time elapses between the two, the versions won't match, causing intermittent failures.

A couple ideas:

• Remove the date/time from the version string entirely.
• Cache the date/time version string between the first call to setup.py and the second one. Something like writing version_s to a version file if that file does not exist, and reading it from the file if it does exist.
• Instead of datetime.now() use the "last modified" time of the most recently modified file in the repository. Drawback is I don't know how reliable the last modified timestamp on files is. It might be good enough (would just use the timestamp of when the repository was checked out).
• Hash all files in the repository (to capture uncomitted changes as well) using something like find . -type f | xargs sha256sum | sha256sum. I don't know if this would work since it yields non-monotonically increasing values, so probably not suitable for a version string.

Let me know what you think. I'd be happy to make any of these changes if you don't have the time.

Detailed error messages I get during intermittent failures

WARNING: Built wheel for aie-python-extras is invalid: Wheel has unexpected file name: expected '0.0.8.2025082823+ba2e6fe', got '0.0.8.2025082900+ba2e6fe'

Unfortunately, pip appears to treat this not just as a warning, but fails due to this:

Failed to build aie-python-extras
error: failed-wheel-build-for-install

× Failed to build installable wheels for some pyproject.toml based projects
╰─> aie-python-extras

[makslevental]

Remove the date/time from the version string entirely.

Can't - I'm too lazy to use actual versioning :)

The rest of the suggestions are just a bit too much engineering for such a smalli-ish problem. One thing you could do is compute the date outside the context of the build and pass it to setup.py as an env var, like I do elsewhere:

DATETIME=$(date +"%Y%m%d%H")
echo "DATETIME=${DATETIME}" | tee -a $GITHUB_OUTPUT

setup.py:

now = datetime.now()
llvm_datetime = os.environ.get(
    "DATETIME", f"{now.year}{now.month:02}{now.day:02}{now.hour:02}"
)

But really there's a much simpler solution:

expected '0.0.8.2025082823+ba2e6fe', got '0.0.8.2025082900+ba2e6fe'

Nice the hour 23 -> `00; this basically can only really fail when you're crossing an hour mark/boundary. So the simplest solution is to just schedule builds at the beginning of the hour.

Alternatively we could just drop the hour portion. If you send a PR for that I'll stamp it.