Environment info

• transformers version: 4.4.2
• Platform: google colab
• Python version: 3.7.10
• PyTorch version (GPU?): n/a
• Tensorflow version (GPU?): n/a
• Using GPU in script?: n/a
• Using distributed or parallel set-up in script?: n/a

Who can help

CC @stas00 as this was implemented in #8645

To reproduce

You can find a complete example in this google colab, also exported to this gist.

To reproduce, first create a new google colab notebook. Let's install recent transformers and tqdm versions in it:

!pip install -U pip
!pip install -U "transformers<5.0.0,>=4.0.0" "tqdm<5.0.0,>=4.45.0"

This currently install transformers 4.4.2 and tqdm 4.59.0.

Surprisingly, now running import transformers fails. We get an error in pkg_resources, which is looking for the .dist-info of tqdm 4.41.1, when the installed version is 4.59.0:

[...]
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py in _get(self, path)
   1609 
   1610     def _get(self, path):
-> 1611         with open(path, 'rb') as stream:
   1612             return stream.read()
   1613 

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/tqdm-4.41.1.dist-info/METADATA'

The cause is that pkg_resources uses the cached WorkingSet, which contains the state before the pip install. We can confirm this by recreating pkg_resources' cache manually:

import pkg_resources

pkg_resources.working_set = pkg_resources.WorkingSet()

Afterwards, importing transformers works.

The above example is the minimized version of our real notebooks examples:

!pip install -U pip
!pip install -U bio_embeddings[all]

from bio_embeddings.embed import SeqVecEmbedder # This line fails with the tqdm .dist-info not found error

Expected behavior

transformers should use the actual installed versions for checking compatibility instead of pkg_resources cache. This could be achieved e.g. by using importlib_metadata instead of pkg_resources here or by recreating pkg_resourcescache withpkg_resources.working_set = pkg_resources.WorkingSet()` before checking versions.

I've used the following snippet to check that importlib_metadata works, which prints 4.41.1 and 4.59.0:

import pkg_resources
import importlib_metadata

print(pkg_resources.get_distribution("tqdm").version)
print(importlib_metadata.version("tqdm"))

I can prepare a pull request for either solution.