templateDir resolves to a local zppy clone instead of the conda environment

[chengzhuzhang]

Issue:

v3.HR simulation analysis requires zppy features that not yet available from e3sm_unified. @xuezhengllnl and I went with the approach to use a shared environment I built locally example, using: source /home/ac.zhang40/y/etc/profile.d/conda.sh; conda activate zppy_dev.

Recently, there was a stubborn issue that ilamb task won't run. After some iterations, we found that in ilamb.settings, templateDir is pointing to her local zppy clone directory. The cause is diagnosed that:

In main.py, templateDir is computed as:
template_dir = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(file), "templates")
file resolves to wherever Python imported zppy from. If a local zppy clone is earlier in sys.path than the conda env's site-packages, the local clone wins. This can happen via:

• PYTHONPATH set to include a local zppy clone
• pip install -e . run in a local zppy clone, which writes a .pth file into site-packages that silently inserts the local path into sys.path — even without
  PYTHONPATH

while using shared local build of zppy is not a common practice, I'm taking a note here that it is needed to either:
Remove the local zppy path from PYTHONPATH, or uninstall the editable install