Reimplement release system using pyproject.toml

[marc-vdm]

Issue

@haasad, a question:

Through #1181 @mrvisscher and I found that the legacy_biosphere folder and compatible_ei_versions.txt are not present in this folder in the conda releases (but ecospold2biosphereimporter.py is present).

The files are present in the release zip here, but are not available in the conda-forge or dev releases.

This is currently breaking installs of older biosphere versions (though for ei3.9 is still working). We didn't catch this as it was working in the master because the files exist there.

Would you know what could cause this, and more importantly, how we could resolve this?

[haasad]

Hey @marc-vdm, that's a part of the codebase that I'm not very familiar with. I haven't touched it in ages if ever.

But I assume this is what's happening:

• the github release zips the whole repo at the specific tag
• conda build uses setup.py install
• setup.py has some magic that decides what files to include: https://github.com/LCA-ActivityBrowser/activity-browser/blob/6ece1b365a96b9a3c907ccd68579034d4e9e81c1/setup.py#L9-L18

You probably have to modify setup.py so the files you want are included (afaics .txt files are currently not packaged).

Side note: we should look into migrating to pyproject.toml, see https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/modernize-setup-py-project/. At the very least we should stop using the deprecated setup.py install invocation directly and use pip install instead, see details in the linked article.

[marc-vdm]

Main issue resolved, we're leaving this open for future implementation of a better release system (such as pyproject.toml)

[marc-vdm]

Thanks a lot for the help @haasad :)