Retire site.cfg

[pp-mo]

Ref: #3458

This is less and less used, and an awkward and old-fashioned approach for users (IMHO).
It now contains just 3 path settings :

• iris-sample-data can be configured by PYTHONPATH instead as it is importable (which is already a supported option).
• iris-test-data could be made importable
• the dot-path remains. Perhaps this can be fixed some other way.
  • frankly this is a really ancient and little-used feature which we probably don't need at all IMHO. But this isn't the time to address that

[bjlittle]

@pp-mo I'm 👍 for tidying the setup.cfg but I'm 👎 on flat out retiring it.... unless you've (we've) got a clear approach to do this. Any further thoughts? 🤔

I really don't believe it makes sense to make iris-test-data importable. It just a big old data blob, and what's more it's only for developers. I'd say that making it importable is not really worth the effort. I think it's just about okay for iris-sample-data to be importable, as long as it doesn't bloat too much further - if it did, then I think that we'd need to seriously reconsider whether it should be importable or not.

[pp-mo]

@bjlittle I really don't believe it makes sense to make iris-test-data importable. It just a big old data blob, and what's more it's only for developers.

ok, maybe it's not needed if we believe in #3416.
But in that case we really need some more help for aspiring developers -- I'll make more comment there..

[bjlittle]

Action on @bjlittle to make a proposal on how to move forwards and rationalise site.cfg et al at the peloton e.g., use of DOCS_DIR

[pp-mo]

Also found we have another setting "Resources/doc_dir "that is still used
in this line
Though it's not mentioned in site.cfg.template

[trexfeathers]

Offline discussion: we all share the ambition!

[bjlittle]

Given https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/, we can now migrate and retire the setup.cfg into the pyproject.toml 👍

[pp-mo]

Given https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/, we can now migrate and retire the setup.cfg into the pyproject.toml 👍

I don't think this is the same thing at all.
This issue is about the site.cfg file (example)
Which the user has to fill in for themselves, after installing, and I still don't think this settings file should be needed at all, really.

So it's really not about packaging, or installing : not done in setup.py/setup.cfg/pyproject.toml