Hypermodern Python podcast

[namurphy]

I listened to a podcast recently on "hypermodern" Python which was a really interesting discussion on a lot of the packaging & testing packages and infrastructure that we depend on. There's also a hypermodern Python package template which I played around with a little bit. There are a bunch of things that we use already (like pre-commit, plus a few new things.

Some of the most interesting possibilities were...

• Using poetry for dependency management and packaging.
• Automating uploads to PyPI and TestPyPI
• Using nox instead of tox for testing environments. The main difference is that the testing configuration is in a regular Python file for nox while it's in a tox.ini file for tox.
• Static type checking with mypy
• Runtime type-checking with Typeguard
• Using a src layout for the package (i.e. move plasmapy/ to src/plasmapy)
• Checking documentation examples with xdoctest
• Managing project labels with GitHub Labeler

Admittedly their list is pretty opinionated, but I was wondering if any of these would be worth trying out. Some of the things might be relatively quick. Switching from tox → nox might be ∼2 days of work, including updating the documentation and testing guide. On the other hand, the type checking stuff would be really helpful in the long run but also a huge amount of work, since we'd need to change how to use our annotations for units and particles.

My reason for considering this now is that I've been dealing with a lot of packaging/testing/documentation infrastructure stuff for a couple of packages besides PlasmaPy, and in the long run it'd be easier to change things up sooner rather than later. On the other hand, some of these changes might not be improvements given the tradeoffs, or worth the effort, or just low priority. In any case, it is worth considering these different possibilities since some of them might really make code development easier in the long run.

[StanczakDominik]

Automating uploads to PyPI and TestPyPI

We do have that! Only conditionally, though, on tagged commits:

PlasmaPy/.github/workflows/testing.yml

Lines 160 to 175 in fc08f03

	- name: Build a binary wheel
	run: python setup.py bdist_wheel
	- name: Build a source tarball
	run: python setup.py sdist
	- name: Twine check
	run: twine check dist/*
	- name: Install PlasmaPy in all variants
	run: |
	pip install --progress-bar off .[all,dev]
	pip install --progress-bar off -e .[all,dev]
	python setup.py develop
	- name: Publish distribution, if tagged, 📦 to PyPI
	if: ${{ startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags') && !endsWith(github.ref, 'dev') }}
	uses: pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish@master
	with:
	password: ${{ secrets.pypi_access_token }}

Static type checking with mypy

Would be nice to have be helpful, but is blocked on #1413.

Managing project labels with GitHub Labeler

That'd be neat to have. The manual web interface is meh at best.

The rest seem like they wouldn't help much...