Multiple plugin templates

[joeycasey87]

Extension of the original cookiecutter plugin template to include other plugin types and subtypes.

[ladc]

Removed duplicate code, ensured tests work with the postprocessors_plugin branch of the main pysteps.

[FelixE91]

Minimum functionality assured with the tests - a test plugin is installed and correctly found in the interface methods.
In the future, we could add the tests for the module methods, i.e., in ./test/test_{{cookiecutter.project_slug}}.py in test_plugins_discovery() add for importer plugins something like

available_importers = [
        attr for attr in dir(importers) if attr.startswith("import_")
    ]
{{cookiecutter.plugin_name}} in available_module_importers

or for diagnostic plugins

available_module_methods = [
            attr
            for attr in dir(importlib.import_module(module_name))
            if attr.startswith(plugintype[:-1])
        ]
{{cookiecutter.plugin_name}} in available_module_methods

[dnerini]

@FelixE91 @ladc Looks like the changes introduced by this PR broke the plug-in test in the main pysteps repo.

Is there a timeline to introduce the necessary changes in the main repo?

Does this mean that breaking changes were introduced? Will older plug-ins stop working?

Did

[FelixE91]

@dnerini pySTEPS/pysteps#405 implements the necessary changes into main pysteps repo. It's almost ready to be merged.

Are there any old plugins that were created with the old cookiecutter? Do you know any plugins that would not work anymore?

To my knowledge, there are the importers and exporters that are explicit in io.importers and io.exporters, respectively, and that were all added explicitly to io.interface.py and the ensemblestats that are explicit in postprocessing.ensemblestats.
Other plugin types than importers were not supported.

We created the new postprocessing.interface to support postprocessing plugins (i.e., plugin types diagnostic and ensemblestats for now).

If anything, we should be fine if we simply add additional read from entry points with group="pysteps.plugins.importers" to the function discover_importers() (for example in line 56 of io.interface)

• I think that's the only change that might break old plugins: we replaced read from entry points with group="pysteps.plugins.importers" by group="pysteps.plugins.importer" (note the trailing "s")

Edit: I just merged the last suggested change into pySTEPS/pysteps#405