Distribute rain-api-core via PyPI

[asjohnston-asf]

TEA currently relies on rain-api-core. TEA installs it via pulling the main branch from github.

Would there be interest in publishing rain-api-core to PyPI? Then TEA could install it like any other python requirement. Another advantage would be versioned releases of rain-api-core rather than relying on main as the current release.

[reweeden]

I would say no. This wasn't designed to be a published package so the API really is quite sloppy. It used to be a submodule as I recall.

In TEA we use dependency locking so while in the requirements.in file it references the main branch, ultimately the requirements.txt is used which references a commit hash so you can safely develop on main without it having an impact on TEA until you re-lock and explicitly pull in those changes. If more advanced versioning is desired, that can also be achieved with GitHub releases which is what we do elsewhere.

[reweeden]

If anything it might be worth pulling it back into the TEA repo like in a mono-repo setup.