Fix add_to_spyder_UMR_excludelist for Spyder 6

[sldesnoo-Delft]

The import of qcodes fails with Spyder 6, because add_to_spyder_UMR_excludelist raises an exception.

This pull request fixes the code to work with Spyder 6.0.
I've removed a bit of old code that was only useful for Spyder 3.x

I don't think this is easy to test with an automatic test, because a test would require Spyder 6.

[sldesnoo-Delft]

@microsoft-github-policy-service agree

[eendebakpt]

I also encountered qcodes not running with the new Spyder 6. The UserModuleReloader is also available via a normal import:

import spyder_kernels.customize.umr; spyder_kernels.customize.umr.UserModuleReloader

Using that instead of sitecustomize.UserModuleReloader works for me so far.

@ccordoba12 Do you have an opinion on how to approach this?

[sldesnoo-Delft]

I tried that as well.
Unfortunately Spyder6 does not use the global umr. So assignment of the changed UMR has no effect.

That's why I searched for the UMR instance that is being used and modify that.

[jenshnielsen]

@eendebakpt @sldesnoo-Delft I am not using spyder my self at the moment so unlikely to spot this.

At some point a long time ago I did look into addressing this issue on the spyder side spyder-ide/spyder#2451 If anyone have bandwidth to do that it would be great as this is a much cleaner option.

Otherwise happy to merge this once you have converted on the best solution

[ccordoba12]

@ccordoba12 Do you have an opinion on how to approach this?

I wasn't aware people was adding modules to our UMR programmatically (no one has reported it to our issue tracker).

Since the code to do that for Spyder 6/Spyder-kernels 3 is too convoluted (from what I can see below), we could add a public API at the shell level (i.e. the object you get with get_python()) to make the life of other projects easier.

@jenshnielsen, @sldesnoo-Delft, what do you think?

[sldesnoo-Delft]

qcodes adds itselft to the list of packages to exclude.

I had a closer look at the UMR. It checks if the module is in the library path. (path_is_library in utils.py). When qcodes is normally installed, i.e. not in "develop mode", then it will not be reloaded by UMR.

So, I believe the add_to_spyder_UMR_excludelist function is not really needed. It might be a remainder from a distant past.

@jenshnielsen , @eendebakpt do you agree?

[jenshnielsen]

@sldesnoo-Delft I think this has ever only been a problem with editable installs. As I recall the problem is that when spyder does reload all singletons are destroyed so instruments are lost. I think that when we originally added this qcodes did not see regular releases, so a lot of users were installing from source. This is much less of an issue now so I think it would be fine to deprecate/remove this.

[eendebakpt]

I have no strong opinion on this, we usually disable the spyder UMR (other packages have issues with automatic reloading as well). We only noticed because the new spyder 6 would not import qcodes.

If we do remove the functionality, I do think it warrants some attention in the release notes (and maybe the documentation?).

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Attention: Patch coverage is 3.70370% with 26 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Project coverage is 68.24%. Comparing base (ef66ccc) to head (5efe1e4).
Report is 148 commits behind head on main.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
src/qcodes/utils/spyder_utils.py	3.70%	26 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #6544      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   69.33%   68.24%   -1.10%     
==========================================
  Files         340      340              
  Lines       31261    31268       +7     
==========================================
- Hits        21676    21340     -336     
- Misses       9585     9928     +343     

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