A bit of context to the failed test on Ubuntu:

Test only fail for Python 3.9, and that is why these do not fail with MacOS. When I run these tests on OSX with Python < 3.10 tests also fail, but we already removed testing for OSX for Python<3.10 because of a changing behavior in GH workflows.

The reason test fail is because a change in behavior in the library importlib.metadata for Python >=3.10.

One solution to this problem that I have seen around, is to try:

try:
    from importlib.metadata import entry_points
except ImportError:  # Python < 3.10 (backport)
    from importlib_metadata import entry_points

However this does not work because importlib.metadata does not throw an Exception during import, and even if it did,importlib_metadata is not installed. importlib_metadata would need to be added either as a dependency for all python versions.

But I do not want to drop support/compat with Python 3.9, which is still one of the stable versions until 2025.

Fix

For now, I will add importlib_metadata as a dependency to pydap until Python 3.9 is no longer a stable version. This allows pydap to provide support for all stable Python versions until Python 3.13 comes along later in 2025.

some additional resources

• insightful discussion: importlib_metadata vs importlibe.metadata
  
• importlib_metadata as a backport to importlib.metadata

I just checked, and there are some (external) deprecation warnings for Python >= 3.12 so I will suppress the Deprecation Warnings and merge :)