v1.3.0a1

This pre-release introduces significant changes to the build process, including bumping Ableton Link 3.1.5 => 4.0, replacing setuptools with scikit-build-core, and dropping support for Python 3.8.

By default, pip will not download this release unless you opt-in with one of the following:

pip install LinkPython-extern==1.3.0a1
pip install --pre LinkPython-extern

As the release of Python 3.15 approaches this year (see Status of Python versions), I want to hold off on publishing the final release of LinkPython-extern v1.3.0 until Python's 3.15 release candidates are available and cibuildwheel / pybind11 adds support for them.

There are no changes to the library's API. Please send in an issue or PR if you would like more of Link's functionality to be exposed! Because honestly, I'm not cut out for this project 😅

Changed

• Drop support for Python 3.8, inline with cibuildwheel v4.0 dropping support (commit)

  In theory, the library could still build for 3.8 as pybind11 hasn't dropped support for it. However, since we can't distribute Python 3.8 wheels as easily, it's safer to raise the minimum Python version. This ensures pip on Python 3.8 will continue to install v1.2.1 from prebuilt wheels instead of trying to compile this library from source.

• Replace setuptools-scm dynamic versioning with static versioning (commit)

• Replace setuptools build system with scikit-build-core (commit)

  These two changes should make the build process significantly less error-prone to weird issues like failing to copy the resulting library during pip install . / uv sync, or exceeding MAX_PATH characters (260) on Windows due to long version names.

• Lock dependencies with uv.lock, for contributors wanting to use Astral uv for development

• Bump pybind11 3.0.1 => 3.0.4 (bug fixes only, Python 3.15 support is yet to come)

Full Changelog: v1.2.1...v1.3.0a1