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Move to hatchling for building the package & use hatch for envs, scripts, matrix tests. #328
Description
Currently, the template is set up to build the package with setuptools. However, the current advise on packaging.python.org is to use hatchling. (related to #318) Edit: The default option is hatch. No specific option is recommended.
This would also be an opportunity to use hatch as project manager. Hatch uses hatchling to build the package in a separate virtual environment, has environment management with scripts, and allows much easier publishing to pypi.
Additionally, hatch is maintained by the Python Packaging Authority.
Hatch would allow us to:
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Make a more clean repository, with fewer configuration files in the main directory (hatch is configured in pyproject.toml)
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Define environments, such as a specific environment for building documentation, with the documentation dependencies contained only in there.
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Define script belonging to a certain environment, for example
hatch run docs:buildto build the documentation. -
Define scripts for linting, to replace prospector. With a single command
hatch run lint, you can (for example) run black, isort, flake8, mypy, pydoctest, etc. -
Use matrix tests for different python versions. This could replace tox.
Together with @Peter9192 I have updated era5cli to use hatch, if you want to see a specific use case. The CI is set up to use the same hatch commands that developers do.
Activity
Peter9192 commentedon Jan 25, 2023
Hatch also provides template configuration: https://hatch.pypa.io/latest/config/project-templates/ so we could set e.g. standard license to apache.
bouweandela commentedon Jan 26, 2023
On the linked documentation page, I see that they use hatchling as the default choice for the tutorial, but I see no advice to prefer this over any other build system. Could you give more information on that? Or did I miss it somehow?
BSchilperoort commentedon Jan 26, 2023
You're correct, Bouwe. I'll modify the top post.
For additional discussion, I have found this nice overview of python packaging options: https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/#tooling-proliferation-and-the-python-package-authority
That article also raises an important point of the (current) bus factor of hatch essentially being 1.
The lack of C-extension support could also be a deal-breaker for some. But I don't know how common that is in the center.
egpbos commentedon Jan 26, 2023
Yeah, C-extension support is pretty important. There are a couple of projects that do things with pybind11 for instance.
ofek commentedon Jan 28, 2023
Hatchling does support custom build hooks so one could still perform the logic of building the extension modules
bouweandela commentedon Feb 2, 2023
I'm not sure if it's worth the effort of changing the template if there is no clear recommendation. Many of the things listed as advantages of using hatch can also be done easily using other tools in common use. For example
bouweandela commentedon Feb 28, 2024
Related to this, we may want to keep an eye on uv
ofek commentedon Feb 28, 2024
The next minor release of Hatch will have an option to use that behind the scenes in place of pip and virtualenv.