feat(packaging): version git archives of arbitrary commits

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

AI-authored. I prompted the exploration; an agent (Claude Opus 5 via Claude Code) assessed the state, wrote the change, ran the builds and wrote this description. I reviewed it and I am posting it. Credited in the commit's Co-authored-by trailer.

Closes #11680.

GitHub serves a source tarball for every commit, not only for tags, but so far only a tag's tarball could be built — without a .git directory setuptools-scm had nothing to read a version from.

This adds a .git_archival.txt expanded by git archive via export-subst.

It uses the stable template — node, node-date, describe-name, deliberately no ref-names. Recording ref-names would tie an archive's content, and so its checksum, to whichever branches happen to point at the commit, so moving a branch afterwards would silently change an already-published download. That instability is why this was declined in 2023; the stable template did not exist yet. Describe output depends only on the commit and the tags reachable from it, so a branch moving cannot change it. Adding or moving a tag in the commit's ancestry still can.

A MANIFEST.in keeps the file out of the sdist. It only carries a version once git archive has expanded it, and an sdist states its version in its metadata anyway; shipping the bare template would leave a stray $Format:...$ for setuptools-scm to consider on every build from an unpacked sdist. Verified that the exclusion drops exactly that one file and nothing else.

While here: off the deprecated write_to onto version_file, and write_to_source = true stated explicitly — setuptools-scm is about to flip that default, and src/_pytest/_version.py should keep being written into checkouts. That option is what sets the new setuptools-scm>=10.1 floor; it can go back to >=8 if the floor is unwelcome, at the cost of a deprecation warning now and a silent behaviour change later.

Releases are unaffected — deploy.yml supplies SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION_FOR_PYTEST.

Verified

check	result
git archive expansion	describe-name matches git describe exactly
build from extracted archive (no .git)	sdist + wheel, correct version
sdist file list, with vs without MANIFEST.in	differs by .git_archival.txt alone
sdist → wheel	correct version, no setuptools-scm warnings
pre-commit run -a	passes

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[patchback]

Backport to 9.1.x: 💚 backport PR created

✅ Backport PR branch: patchback/backports/9.1.x/de30d8417f3d93bc0c16fc0a64092e197c46e36a/pr-15023

Backported as #15025

🤖 @patchback
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