Enh/elephant data versioning

[Moritz-Alexander-Kern]

With this PR versioning for elephant-data (currently on: https://gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data) is introduced.

Issue

Different files from elephant-data are used in unit-tests and tutorial notebooks. Since the datasets on elephant-data may undergo various changes over time, any change would potentially break the unit tests of old elephant versions.

During development of a new tutorial or unit-test the used files might not yet be merged into elephant-data[master]. This requires the use of hard coded links to the development branch (on gin) until merged.

download_datasets: use only paths relative to repo root

Those issues might be addressed by creating releases of the elephant-data repository. Currently all links used in tutorials and unit-tests have to following structure:

Link to root of repository+path starting at root
example:
'https://web.gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data/raw/master/'+'unittest/spectral/multitaper_psd/data/time_series.npy'

This PR addresses this issue by introducing a new function download_datasets , which contains a default URL (first part in example above) and hence only requires the relative path from repository root as input. This default URL could be set to a specific release of elephant-data, e.g. 'https://web.gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data/raw/0.0.1'pointing to release v0.0.1. With every new version of elephant, this could be changed to the corresponding elephant-data version.

Update: A first release of elephant-data was created (v0.11.0). download_datasets now uses the currently installed version of elephant to create the URL pointing to a specific elephant-data release.

environment variable ELEPHANT_DATA_URL

Furthermore an environment variable ELEPHANT_DATA_URL is introduced, which allows to specify a different URL to the root of the repository.

Typical use cases could be development and CI workflows.

• for CI use the latest state of elephant-data
  - set ELEPHANT_DATA_URL to 'https://web.gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data/raw/master/'
• during development use a specific branch (e.g. multitaper) of elephant-data
  - set ELEPHANT_DATA_URL to 'https://web.gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data/raw/multitaper'

In both use cases an environment variable is changed and only the relative paths to the repository's root are hard coded.

TODO:

• create release of elephant-data (https://gin.g-node.org/INM-6/elephant-data)
• set default URL to first release

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.1%) to 88.557% when pulling 4af2ed8 on INM-6:enh/elephant_data_versioning into 7a6d3f2 on NeuralEnsemble:master.

[pep8speaks]

Hello @Moritz-Alexander-Kern! Thanks for updating this PR. We checked the lines you've touched for PEP 8 issues, and found:

There are currently no PEP 8 issues detected in this Pull Request. Cheers! 🍻

Comment last updated at 2022-03-30 15:47:01 UTC