Rework CI/CD

[Alexboiboi]

Related Issues

• Rework CI workflows #683

This PR is a first attempt at reworking the CI/CD workflows and introduces several changes in the project structure.

Move to Github Actions

As mentioned in #683 we are currently using azure-pipelines and CircleCI to run our continuous integration jobs. In order to reduce maintenance work, we will now move to Github Workflows as main CI tool (see https://docs.github.com/en/actions).

The new python-app.yml Github workflow configuration file in .github/workflows encompasses the following actions:

• run pylint
• unit testing (needs pylint to pass before starting)
  • run matrix also on [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]
  • run matrix on python-version: ["3.8", "3.9", "3.10", "3.11", "3.12"]
• publish to Pypi including wheel, triggered on tags

Other todos:

• keep Code QL Github-Action
• remove .circleci folder and content
• remove azure-pipelines.yml config file

Github Apps

Even if there is a pre-commit github action available. I suggest to use the App, as it has the benefit to update the pre-commit dependencies automatically via PRs (see https://pre-commit.ci/lite.html)

• add Pre-commit CI
• remove CircleCI app
• remove AzurePipeline app
• keep CodeCov

Setup files

The new standard to structure python projects is defacto the move from setup.py to pyproject.toml. (see https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/declaring-project-metadata/#declaring-project-metadata) All the metadata related to the project is store there, including the optional dependencies for testing and the docs.

• move to pyproject.toml
• keep minimalistic stetup.py

Further automation

We are currently already using tox to automate testing.
This PR extends the tox.ini to allow building the docs via the tox -e docs call. This feature is still susceptible to change and I'd prefer to deal with it in another PR. We will aslo need to update the docs README.md file to take this into account and maybe also add this to the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

@OrtnerMichael Could you please review this PR and especially thoroughly the pyproject.toml metadata. Thanks

[OrtnerMichael]

is this email correct ?

maintainers = [
{name = "Alexandre Boisselet", email = "[email protected]"}
]

[Alexboiboi]

is this email correct ?

maintainers = [ {name = "Alexandre Boisselet", email = "[email protected]"} ]

yes (see https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html)