ESMValTool development version number

[bouweandela]

At the moment, the version number of the ESMValTool is the same for the latest release and for the development version. This makes it difficult to identify which version of ESMValCore/Tool someone is running in e.g. logs and provenance. At the very least, I think we should e.g. right after the v2.3 release, increase the version number in the main branch to 2.4.dev or something similar.

If we want to automate this a bit further, we could consider using a tool like versioneer for our versioning? It looks like it is maintained again.

See pep 440 for some background info on what valid version names are.

@ESMValGroup/technical-lead-development-team

[valeriupredoi]

versioneer was in disrepair for a while, might be again? But I like the idea of having different versions though 👍

[bouweandela]

We could also look at https://pypi.org/project/setuptools-scm/

[zklaus]

I usually use versioneer, but am open to discussions. Do you know any pros/cons for one or the other?

[bouweandela]

The setuptools-scm solution is mentioned as the last option on https://packaging.python.org/guides/single-sourcing-package-version/, so it looks like it is recommended by the Python community. There are also a few other tools mentioned there.

[znicholls]

This would be super helpful for me. I'm trying to do some work and also develop ESMValTool at the same time. If the version was automated, I'd easily be able to find what I used. At the moment I just get the hard-coded version number.

For what it's worth, xarray uses setuptools_scm. I've had good experiences with it too and moving across isn't crazy difficult. Happy to share experiences there if helpful (while I'm thinking about it, there's basically two steps: 1) move your repository e.g. https://github.com/openscm/openscm-runner/pull/61/files 2) fix conda packaging so right dependencies are installed e.g. https://github.com/conda-forge/cmip6_preprocessing-feedstock/pull/8/files)

[bouweandela]

I just created a pull request to implement this for ESMValCore ESMValGroup/ESMValCore#1578. If that is accepted and merged, we can also add this for ESMValTool.

[bouweandela]

This is now implemented in ESMValCore. I started a pull request to do the same thing for the tool, but it's not working yet: #2663.