ci: make the clean-install smoke test import from outside the checkout

[boai-maker]

The problem

smoke-install installs the package and then runs the import check from the repository root:

pip install .
python -c "import tradingagents, cli.main; print('clean-install import OK')"

python -c prepends the current working directory to sys.path. At the repo root that directory contains tradingagents/ and cli/, so both names resolve to the source tree, not to the distribution pip just installed.

Verified on a clean 3.12 venv against current main:

# from the repo root — what CI does today
cli           -> <repo>/cli/__init__.py
tradingagents -> <repo>/tradingagents/__init__.py

# from outside the checkout
cli           -> site-packages/cli/__init__.py
tradingagents -> site-packages/tradingagents/__init__.py

The package is packaged correctly today, so nothing is currently red — this is a latent gap, not a live break. But the job cannot fail for the reason it exists. A module dropped from the built artifact, or an undeclared runtime dependency (the #994 python-dotenv case the comment names), would still be satisfied by the source tree in the working directory and the job would report success.

cd "$RUNNER_TEMP" before the import makes it test the installed distribution.

Also hardened while touching the file

Change	Why
permissions: contents: read	No job writes to the repo, packages, or checks — don't inherit the repository default
concurrency keyed on workflow name, cancel-in-progress only for pull_request	Every commit landing on main keeps a CI result instead of being cancelled by the next push
pip caching via setup-python, keyed on pyproject.toml	The four matrix legs currently rebuild the dev env from scratch each run
ruff==0.16.8 instead of ruff>=0.15	That constraint already floats a full minor — it resolves to 0.16.8 today. ruff check . still passes on it, so this isn't a fix for a break; it stops a future release adding a rule to the strict select and reddening main with no commit behind it
timeout-minutes on all three jobs	A hung pytest is cut off in 20 min rather than consuming the 6-hour default

Deliberately not included

ruff format --check — pyproject.toml notes that whole-repo formatter adoption is deferred until the open-PR backlog clears, and it would reformat 118 of 160 files today. Left alone.

No change to the rule set, the matrix, or what is linted.

Verification

• ruff check . passes on 0.16.8 (unchanged behaviour)
• Workflow parses as valid YAML; all three jobs intact
• Import shadowing reproduced and the fix confirmed, paths above

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[boai-maker]

Closing this — withdrawing at the author's request. Apologies for the noise.