Restore versioneer

[ian-r-rose]

Follow-up to #162, restoring versioneer in setup.py. @jacobtomlinson I'd appreciate it if you could check if this looks right to you, since you have more experience with versioneer than I.

[jacobtomlinson]

Looks great! I wonder given that JS insists we code the version in package.json whether the Python code should read from there instead of using versioneer. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent for the JS community.

[ian-r-rose]

Thanks for taking a look @jacobtomlinson! Yeah, reading from the package.json is in fact what we were doing before I put versioneer back in place, see ab9d149 .

I also had to do some unfortunate sys.path patching in 09d589c because versioneer doesn't quite play nicely with the new PEP 518 style build here. See, e.g., this discussion.

So I think it may be a good idea to look at alternatives for versioneer (maybe setuptools-scm?), but I haven't really done the research, and I wanted to just get this working in the short-term again.

[jacobtomlinson]

Versioneer has some new maintainers, so if things aren't working correctly it might be worth raising an issue over there.

But I guess my point was, given that we have to manually specify the version in the package.json should we bother with auto versioning at all?