Consider removing versioneer?

[GeorgianaElena]

In a recent PR we discussed about the benefits of using versioneer for traefik-proxy.
This issue is meant to summarize our discussion and have it for future reference (in case problems may arrise).

Pros

• Creating releases is simpler because no files need to be edited (repo2docker's release process benefits greatly from this)
• Development versions report their exact commit automatically (minor benefit unless development-version use is common)
• Autogenerated files handle many cases and are thus more complex than manually edited files.
• Easy to use

Cons

• Installation from development versions other than the main git repo (git-archive, forks with out-of-date tags) works fine, but can report the wrong version (which may stop 'working fine' when dependencies enter into it)
• Autogenerated files handle many cases and are thus more complex than manually edited files.
• Hard to understand and debug
• versioneer may be unmaintained:
  • Consider using setuptools-scm instead of versioneer pytroll/satpy#678
  • Future plans for versioneer pydata/xarray#2853

[consideRatio]

Since release docs are added from #89 with a to me sufficient explanation of how the versioneer script works, I dont mind relying on it. My main issue was missing knowledge and yet another tool to learn about, but ive now learned i didnt need to learn much and the same is documented for future maintainers now!

[dolfinus]

Hello.

May I propose using my own tool for generating version number using git repo information?
https://github.com/dolfinus/setuptools-git-versioning

Pros:

1. It does not require copying some file into the root of the repo and adding nasty hacks like this one:

   traefik-proxy/setup.py

   Line 16 in 397092b

   here = os.path.dirname(__file__)

2. It does not generate any files in the repo, just filling up module version metadata
3. It can fallback to static version written to a file or stored in the module if there are no tags in the current branch or you've downloaded source code in a zip/tag.gz.
4. Easy to install and use too

Or there are some other tools which can handle this was of storing the version number, like setuptools_scm.

But I strongly advise to get rid of vesioneer. The way it is embeds into the project is really nasty.