“ImportError: Numba needs NumPy 1.21 or less”

[tomvothecoder]

Overview

Hi, some xcdat developers are running into an issue where incompatible versions of numba and numpy are being installed together. The xcdat package depends on xesmf, which depends on numba.

Root Cause

The numba conda recipe does not properly constrain the compatible numpy version based on the numba version.

There are related GH issues that have yet to be resolved:

• Need meta-data patches for Numba/NumPy version compatibility? conda-forge/numba-feedstock#90
• numba 0.55.0 on defaults doesn't constrain numpy as expected numba/numba#7794

As a result, conda/mamba sometimes successfully builds the xcdat (with the xesmf) package using incompatible versions of numba and numpy. We only find out these two packages are incompatible when we import <PACKAGE> and get “ImportError: Numba needs NumPy 1.21 or less”.

Possible Workaround

For xcdat, we constrained numba >=0.55.2 to ensure compatibility with numpy >= 1.22.

Here's the related issue and PR:

• “ImportError: Numba needs NumPy 1.21 or less” conda-forge/xcdat-feedstock#5
• Constrain numba >=0.55.2 for numpy >=1.22 compatibility conda-forge/xcdat-feedstock#9

Version compatibility table

https://numba.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/installing.html#version-support-information

Numba	Release date	Python	NumPy	llvmlite	LLVM	TBB
0.57.x	TBC	3.8.x <= version < 3.12	1.19 <= version < 1.24	0.40.x	11.x	2021.x
0.56.x	2022-07-25	3.7.x <= version < 3.11	1.18 <= version < 1.23	0.39.x	11.x	2021.x
0.55.2	2022-05-25	3.7.x <= version < 3.11	1.18 <= version < 1.23	0.38.x	11.x	2021.x
0.55.{0,1}	2022-01-13	3.7.x <= version < 3.11	1.18 <= version < 1.22	0.38.x	11.x	2021.x
0.54.x	2021-08-19	3.6.x <= version < 3.10	1.17 <= version < 1.21	0.37.x	11.x	2021.x
0.53.x	2021-03-11	3.6.x <= version < 3.10	1.15 <= version < 1.21	0.36.x	11.x	2019.5 <= version < 2021.4
0.52.x	2020-11-30	3.6.x <= version < 3.9	1.15 <= version < 1.20	0.35.x	10.x (9.x for aarch64)	2019.5 <= version < 2020.3
0.51.x	2020-08-12	3.6.x <= version < 3.9	1.15 <= version < 1.19	0.34.x	10.x (9.x for aarch64)	2019.5 <= version < 2020.0
0.50.x	2020-06-10	3.6.x <= version < 3.9	1.15 <= version < 1.19	0.33.x	9.x	2019.5 <= version < 2020.0
0.49.x	2020-04-16	3.6.x <= version < 3.9	1.15 <= version < 1.18	0.31.x <= version < 0.33.x	9.x	2019.5 <= version < 2020.0
0.48.x	2020-01-27	3.6.x <= version < 3.9	1.15 <= version < 1.18	0.31.x	8.x (7.x for ppc64le)	2018.0.5 <= version < ?
0.47.x	2020-01-02	3.5.x <= version < 3.9; version == 2.7.x	1.15 <= version < 1.18	0.30.x	8.x (7.x for ppc64le)	2018.0.5 <= version < ?