updates serpent tools dependency and pins python version

[samgdotson]

Summary of changes

This PR updates the environment.yml file by

• pinning a version of Python that is less than 3.12
• installing serpentTools via pip directly from GitHub, rather than PyPI.

This should fix the failing tests on GH actions.

Types of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)

Required for Merging

• I have read the CONTRIBUTING document.
• My code follows the code style of this project.
• My change requires a change to the documentation.
  • I have updated the documentation accordingly.
• My change is a source code change
  • I have added/modified tests to cover my changes
  • I have explained why my change does not require new/modified tests
• My change is a user-facing change
  • I have recorded my changes in the changelog for the upcoming release
• My change is exclusively related to the repository (e.g. GitHub actions workflows, PR/issue templates, etc.)
  • I have verified or justified that my change will work as intended.
• All new and existing tests passed.
  • CI tests pass
  • Local tests pass (including Serpent2 integration tests)

Associated Issues and PRs

• Issue: #

Associated Developers

• Dev: @

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[samgdotson]

@yardasol I did my best to move the needle on this... I'm not sure what testing you've done but I'm sure you're aware of the Numpy issues. I worked on it for a bit but it feels a little like whack-a-mole.

Fortunately, the error message is different. I now suspect the problem is with the installation of saltproc itself. I'm not totally sure how to tell setuptools to install a package from GitHub... I found this old documentation (which is a bit light on the documentation) suggesting something called "dependency links". But I'm not sure how much hacking you want to do with setuptools since I think it's becoming deprecated, anyway.

[yardasol]

Thanks @samgdotson , I suspect a better solution would be to move away from setuptools to a more modern build procedure, like a pyproject.toml

[katyhuff]

This seems to be failing with
ERROR: Package 'openmc' requires a different Python: 3.10.6 not in '>=3.11' Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

@samgdotson @yardasol : What do you recommend here? It seems like the python version allowed continues to cause issues.

[yardasol]

@samgdotson I spent a couple hours chipping away at this today, and I think everything should be working now. The new changes are as follows:

1. We have completely done away with source-building OpenMC. This was done during development of SaltProc as I needed access to the development version for the updated depletion API. That API has now since officially been released. I've pinned a minimum version of OpenMC that supports this API (0.14.0)
2. The setup-miniconda action cannot seem to find versions of OpenMC greater than 0.13.2 when the use-only-tar-bz2 option is set to true. This option is required for caching to work properly, which was more important when we were building OpenMC from source. With a conda-build, the amount of time to spin up an environment is greatly reduced, so we can get rid of this option and most of the caching system, including the separate action for doing so which is not really needed.

Let me know your thoughts.

[samgdotson]

@yardasol it’s such a relief to finally see the GH actions pass. I’m copacetic if you want to go ahead and merge it. Or if @katyhuff wants to merge since we (Olek and I) both worked on this PR.

We can address porting over to pyproject in a separate issue/PR.

[katyhuff]

Thanks!