assign a filler to __version__ if it cannot be imported (#907)

Co-authored-by: Ryan Ly <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: pre-commit-ci[bot] <66853113+pre-commit-ci[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>

Author: 3 people

src/hdmf/__init__.py

@@ -31,7 +31,11 @@ def get_region_slicer(**kwargs):
     # see https://effigies.gitlab.io/posts/python-packaging-2023/
     from ._version import __version__
 except ImportError:  # pragma: no cover
-    pass
+    # this is a relatively slower method for getting the version string
+    from importlib.metadata import version  # noqa: E402
+
+    __version__ = version("hdmf")
+    del version
 
 
 from ._due import BibTeX, due  # noqa: E402