isort support

[VeckoTheGecko]

isort sorts your imports so that you don't have to. The tool organises them into 5 sections separated by newlines:

• FUTURE (eg. from __future__ import annotations)
• STDLIB (eg. import os)
• THIRDPARTY (eg. import xarray)
• FIRSTPARTY (eg. import parcels.Field)
• LOCALFOLDER (eg. from .utils import square)

Within each section the imports are sorted alphabetically, and also squashes imports down to one line.
eg.

from parcels.field import Field
from parcels.field import NestedField
from parcels.field import SummedField
from parcels.field import VectorField

becomes

from parcels.field import Field, NestedField, SummedField, VectorField

This will make import statements through the codebase much more structured, and easier to read. isort also has good integration with pre-commit.

You can add # isort:skip to a line to prevent isort from moving the import statement.

[VeckoTheGecko]

Although this tool does standardize the code (so people don't have to worry about import orders), it does result in a large diff in this PR (and hence soiling git blame).

If having a good git blame is important, might be worth adding a .git-blame-ignore-revs file referencing commits that implement large formatting changes so they get ignored in git blame view.

[VeckoTheGecko]

That's pretty much it for this feature. Happy to discuss more, or merge if it looks good. Completely up to you and your team @erikvansebille if you want to merge this, or stick with manual import sorting.

[VeckoTheGecko]

isort will mess with the custom sorting here.

[erikvansebille]

Do you know why there's only one class per line in this import call (and similar files)? From the isort documentation, it seems that multiple classes are also supported. Or is this intentional because it's even cleaner?

[VeckoTheGecko]

This is the way imports are formatted using the black auto formatter, which isort is compatible with by specifying the profile to be black (see the modified setup.cfg).

Although we don't use black at the moment, it is a really popular formatter that I think would be good to consider introducing in future. This is just a small step in that direction, preventing reformatting the imports again should we start using black.

[erikvansebille]

Thanks for implementing this, @VeckoTheGecko; looks great! I agree with you that using tools like isort to clean up the code (and keep it clean) will facilitate development. So I'm happy to merge into master after you've answered my question above on the one-per-line-import in the test*-files

[VeckoTheGecko]

@erikvansebille would you mind bringing new_docs up to date with master? I'm wanting to branch off new_docs with these new changes :)

[erikvansebille]

@erikvansebille would you mind bringing new_docs up to date with master? I'm wanting to branch off new_docs with these new changes :)

Yup, will do after I also merged #1325. But can't you do it yourself?

[VeckoTheGecko]

new_docs is on the parcels repo, so I have no permissions or write access (outside of submitting PRs into it). So I can't merge master into it

[erikvansebille]

OK, I've just invited you to the OceanParcels team, so that you can commit directly on the OceanParcels repo. Welcome to the team!

[VeckoTheGecko]

Glad to be aboard! 🥳🥳🥳🥳