I am not in favour of this, if astropy core needs to put a restrictive pin on pytest it should do it there. Lots of packages inside and outside the astropy ecosystem use this and they might have different pytest version requirements.

Specifically sunpy tries to let its tests run on about a years worth of pytest releases to make it easier for distro packagers, I don't really want to have our version of pytest dragged along by this metapackage.

astropy needs pytest>=7.0, and it also now needs pytest-doctestplus>=0.12, but I'll refrain from updating this pull request until it is clear whether the requirements should be updated here or directly in astropy.

I thought I already pinned pytest minversion in astropy. Is this really necessary here?

The setup.cfg file in astropy does set the minimum required version of pytest to be 7.0, but it does so in the [tool:pytest] section. If an older version of pytest is installed then testing fails quickly with an error before any tests are even collected. However, that line in setup.cfg is apparently ignored by pip, so it does not prevent installing astropy with an older version of pytest and simply running pip install -e . or pip install astropy does not help because pytest will not be upgraded.

In that case, I could maybe "hardpin" it in astropy's setup.cfg. That would make Stuart happy, hopefully.

I recall we already had this discussion a few weeks ago and decided along the lines of Stuart 's comment above, that just because astopy needs the restriction the metapackage shouldn't force it on others.

As far as I can tell right current astropy main branch requires

1. pytest>=7.0
2. pytest-doctestplus>=0.12
3. pytest-astropy-header>=0.2

I doesn't matter much to me whether they are defined here or directly in astropy, so I can open a pull request there if that is considered preferable.

@eerovaher , let's try a PR directly to astropy then since there are objections here. Thank you so much for your help and patience!

OTOH, bumping the pytest plugin versions in this PR is all ok, at least that's what we used to do here.

So should we update the plugin version requirements here, make a release of pytest-astropy and then update the pytest and pytest-astropy requirements in astropy?

Do we have to overcomplicate things like this? 👀

Superseded by astropy/astropy#12914 . Thanks, @eerovaher !

p.s. Maybe a metapackage is more pain than its worth. Packages can pin whatever they want themselves. We don't have to babysit them with a metapackage but that is a discussion for another day.