Support nir.__version__ about nir

[biphasic]

for Sinabs and Tonic I'm using pbr to automatically manage versions based on git tags. An option that I read about but have never tried is versioneer

[sheiksadique]

I suggest we use setuptools-git-versioning tool for version management if we want to automate and do intermediate/pre releases. https://setuptools-git-versioning.readthedocs.io/en/v1.13.3/

I plan on migrating to this eventually as this seems to be closer to the setup tools and pep specifications. PBR isn't 100% identical to the standard library specifications even though it works well. Versioneer is a bit ugly in that it requires us to include an entire file with complex versioning logic into the repository.

[Jegp]

The latest PR #27 should add this to the nir package.

It uses the dynamic version number attribute in pyproject.toml, so the only place we have a version number is in the __init__.py file in the nir folder.

I'm wondering if we should continue the discussion on release management. It would be nice to automate the release process. But then again, currently it's a simple matter of (a) bumping the version number and (b) creating a release. Is it worth improving? @biphasic @sheiksadique

[sheiksadique]

I am not certain how you typically deal with release management, so I can't comment about its complexity.

But there are essentially two places where the version is maintained still:

1. the init.py file
2. git tag/version.

It is therefore possible in principle to have these two things out of sync.

There are essentially three advantages to automate the process of releases.

1. There will be a unique location of version information.
2. The releases themselves can be automatically handled ie you do not need to create a separate release. A simple act of tagging should automate a major/minor release.
3. Any versions that are not explicitly tagged but pushed to the repos can still be published as pre-releases giving users immediate access to this without having to look up things in GitHub.

[Jegp]

Thanks for the comments @sheiksadique! I think you have very valid points, that would be worthy to treat in a separate issue: #48