html_url,issue_url,id,node_id,user,created_at,updated_at,author_association,body,reactions,performed_via_github_app,issue
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/5676#issuecomment-893467249,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/5676,893467249,IC_kwDOAMm_X841QTpx,14808389,2021-08-05T13:38:02Z,2021-08-05T13:38:02Z,MEMBER,"we had a lengthy discussion about a related topic in #4295. Long story short: we will be able to switch to `importlib.metadata` once we can drop support for `py37` (and we can already use `importlib.resources` for the CSS and HTML files, feel free to send in a PR for that).

For the backends, we could use the separate `entrypoints` library (which I believe is faster), but as far as I can tell we will only make that switch once we can drop the dependency on `pkg_resources` entirely.

For reference, [NEP29](https://numpy.org/neps/nep-0029-deprecation_policy.html#support-table) allows dropping support for `py37` after Dec 26.","{""total_count"": 2, ""+1"": 2, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,961780560
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/5676#issuecomment-893459440,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/5676,893459440,IC_kwDOAMm_X841QRvw,4160723,2021-08-05T13:27:09Z,2021-08-05T13:29:11Z,MEMBER,"> There are better approaches to set the version number than to use this heavy weight module. For instance setuptools_scm.

Looks like it is still required to [retrieve the version number at runtime](https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm#retrieving-package-version-at-runtime) for python versions < 3.8, unless we agree to temporarily depend on the [importlib_metada](https://pypi.org/project/importlib-metadata/) backport.

> As far as I could see, the module is used to set the version number of xarray

It is also used for the backend entry-points and for loading a couple of static css/html files for the html reprs. I don't know if there are better approaches for this, though.","{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,961780560