Introducing dataclasses?

[vigji]

I think that dataclasses would be very convenient to clean up the controls on the metadata structure and potentially in other places.
Downside is, they were introduced in python 3.7. I never tried to support them on python 3.6 but it should be pip installable there

[adamltyson]

I haven't used them, but from my point of view, I'm ok if we need to drop Python 3.6 support. Might not be ideal for brainrender though.

[FedeClaudi]

I think brainrender works with 3.7

[adamltyson]

I think brainrender works with 3.7

It does, but unlike amap/cellfinder in which users are likely to have a dedicated python environment, brainrender users are more likely to use it with other packages (which may require other python versions).

[FedeClaudi]

yeah fair point.
What's the advantage of dataclasses? Other than that they fill in init automatically

[vigji]

It's a neat concise way to ensure data type consistency (plus little nice json i/o maybe) that can be handy for metadata description. Is not revolutionary though, and looking more into it it does not provide tools to do easily other validations apart from type. So probably can be left out for the moment!