Implement temporary fix for CI

[ElliottKasoar]

Resolves #372

See also, discussion in pymatgen: materialsproject/pymatgen#4243

I think unsetting CI is the only solution, as I think otherwise os.getenv("CI") is not None evaluates to True, even if CI is set to "", False, etc.

This change should be reverted once #374 is implemented, as we should be able to update monty to include the fix: materialsvirtuallab/monty#735.

[DanielYang59]

I think unsetting CI is the only solution, as I think otherwise os.getenv("CI") is not None evaluates to True, even if CI is set to "", False, etc.

AFAIK, to unset an env var (or any other value in yaml in general), you would need to set it to null instead of some other falsy string like "", "false" and so on (because our code doesn't check the "semantic meaning" of the string, but it's presence). Let me know if this doesn't work

[ElliottKasoar]

I think unsetting CI is the only solution, as I think otherwise os.getenv("CI") is not None evaluates to True, even if CI is set to "", False, etc.

AFAIK, to unset an env var (or any other value in yaml in general), you would need to set it to null instead of some other falsy string like "", "false" and so on (because our code doesn't check the "semantic meaning" of the string, but it's presence). Let me know if this doesn't work

I think setting it to null would work it it were directly being read into the Python, but as this is setting the environment variable itself, I think this still ends up roughly equivalent to "" - see failed test and debugging test, where I echo $CI and print os.getenv("CI")/os.getenv("CI") is not None.

(I went through a similar realisation about what monty was doing, initially assuming setting CI to False would would work, before realising it needed to evaluate to None.)

[oerc0122]

The real problem is that the code is actually checking if "CI" in os.environ rather than checking if os.getenv("CI").lower() in ("true", "1") which would be more useful.

[DanielYang59]

The real problem is that the code is actually checking if "CI" in os.environ rather than checking if os.getenv("CI").lower() in ("true", "1") which would be more useful.

Yep that was the original implementation (and now we decided to drop this warning/exception completely). This was intended as we anticipate either one of the two situations:

• Either running in Github Actions, CI would always be set to true
• If not, CI would be absent

We cannot think of too many cases where the user would need to change the value of CI, therefore we only checked if it's present