Automate release process?

[jeromekelleher]

Our Python release process is a little tricky, consisting of

• Bumping the version number in tskit/_version.py (we use setuptools_scm in msprime and other repos to do this automatically based on the Git tags. I couldn't get this to work properly with the multi-language structure of this repo though, so ended up handling this manually).
• Setting the release date and finalising the notes in the CHANGELOG (we haven't been very systematic about keeping this up to date, so there's usually some history to review and changes to summarise).
• Locally building an sdist, and uploading this to PyPI
• Tagging a release on GitHub with a copy of the CHANGELOG notes

It would be nice if we could at least automate the process of building the sdist and uploading to PyPI after a release has been tagged on GitHub. The tools available for this sort of thing have been very nicely summarised here: zarr-developers/numcodecs#70 (comment)

I would be great to have manylinux binary wheels, if we could, but maybe it's not worth the bother since the compile time is so short.

Any thoughts @benjeffery, @petrelharp?

[jeromekelleher]

See here for cool stuff on wheel building: zarr-developers/numcodecs#224

[benjeffery]

Nice, it is certainly on my list to review releasing and packaging. Python packaging is moving in the right direction, e.g. https://snarky.ca/what-the-heck-is-pyproject-toml/

[jeromekelleher]

Cool, I'm totally on-board with that!

[molpopgen]

Nice point here on ditching requirements.txt: https://snarky.ca/clarifying-pep-518/

I haven't totally wrapped my head around pep 518, especially when compiled code is part of the process.

[jeromekelleher]

See also #636

[benjeffery]

Closing this as #681 addressed the auto wheel building.