Remove `__init__` from toplevel earthkit

[Oisin-M]

What maintenance does this project need?

Currently we have duplicated __init__ in earthkit and earthkit-utils. However, as an end state we should aim to have just one single init in earthkit-utils, and make this package purely export a version. This would cause issues upgrading existing environments (see #144), so should be considered a breaking change. I am opening this issue so this is not forgotten about, but will require planning on when/how to do this.

What I propose would need to happen

• Toplevel earthkit should export only a version, probably to earthkit.version submodule to be extra safe so we can export only earthkit.version in pyproject and avoid warning: The module earthkit is provided by more than one package
• earthkit-utils should be updated to import version from earthkit.version (assuming we do above suggestion)
• NB Communicate to users that upgrading existing environments will have issues, and document well how to fix this (by force reinstalling earthkit-utils)

Organisation

ECMWF

[juntyr]

Why does this top-level package need to exist at all? Namespace packages are nowadays typically implicit. Is it just to have one meta-package that users can install to install all possible dependencies at once?

[Oisin-M]

Hi @juntyr, it's a good question. The main need for this toplevel package is for an easy installation like you mention. However, earthkit will not be a totally implicit namespace package because of the following pattern we wish to support

import earthkit as ek
ek.data.something()

This requires an __init__.py in the earthkit/ folder, so we cannot support it with a typical implicit namespace package. However, that piece will move to earthkit-utils in future