We should adopt in this repo the best practices for scientific python programming. A streamlined way to do this is to apply this cookiecutter: https://github.com/scientific-python/cookie. This would add:
- GitHub workflows for CI and CD. Each time a GitHub Release is created, it triggers the build, test, and publishing of wheels.
- Extraction of package version from source control by leveraging setuptools-scm. The generated source distribution would include the relevant version metadata.
- Pre-commit hooks for checking style. To start with, I plan to add linting exceptions to prevent sweeping style changes. I can make only the smaller style changes.
- Dependabot configuration. This automates a lot of routine maintenance
The major benefit of this that openlifu can be more easily maintained and automatically published to PyPI upon release. This brings it further into the larger python ecosystem by allowing other packages to mark it as a dependency.