MNT Automate version management with setuptools-scm and simplify release workflow

[Copilot]

Eliminates manual version file editing and reduces release process from 5 steps to 1. Follows implementation pattern from gallantlab/autoflatten.

Changes

Version Management

• Version numbers now automatically derived from git tags via setuptools-scm
• cortex/version.py imports from auto-generated _version.py with fallback for dev environments
• Removed manual version parsing logic from setup.py
• Development versions auto-increment as X.Y.Z.devN between releases

Release Workflow

• Replaced tag-based workflow with release event trigger
• Builds artifacts in isolated job, publishes to both PyPI and TestPyPI
• Uses trusted publishing (OIDC) instead of API tokens
• Added workflow_dispatch for manual TestPyPI testing
• fetch-depth: 0 ensures setuptools-scm can access full git history

Release Process (see updated RELEASE.md)

# Before: Edit version.py, commit, tag, push, create release, revert version
# After: Create GitHub release with version tag (e.g., v1.3.0)

Prerequisites for Deployment

Repository admins must configure PyPI/TestPyPI environments with trusted publishing before workflow can publish packages.

Original prompt

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This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>Simplify release workflow</issue_title>
<issue_description>The current release workflow requires too many steps.
Follow what I implemented in https://github.com/gallantlab/autoflatten:

1. Use setuptools-scm to automatically derive version numbers from git tags
2. Set up a workflow to release to pypi and testpypi upon new github releases.

</issue_description>

<agent_instructions>Make sure to check how I implemented this in https://github.com/gallantlab/autoflatten. I will need to enable environments in pypi/testpypi. But you can assume that they will be available. </agent_instructions>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

• Fixes Simplify release workflow #586

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR aims to switch pycortex to automatic versioning via setuptools-scm and to simplify the release process so that publishing to PyPI/TestPyPI happens automatically from GitHub releases.

Changes:

• Removed manual version parsing from setup.py and moved version management to setuptools-scm, exposing the version via cortex.version.
• Introduced a new GitHub Actions workflow that builds distributions once and publishes them to both PyPI and TestPyPI using trusted publishing, with support for manual TestPyPI-only runs.
• Updated release documentation and .gitignore to reflect the new automated workflow and generated _version.py file.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 6 out of 7 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
setup.py	Removed the custom get_version() machinery and the explicit version argument to setup(), intending to let setuptools-scm supply the version instead.
pyproject.toml	Declared setuptools-scm as a build requirement and added a [tool.setuptools_scm] section to configure writing a generated version file under cortex/.
cortex/version.py	Replaced the previous git-describe-based dynamic version logic with a simple import from cortex._version (generated by setuptools-scm) and a hardcoded development fallback.
RELEASE.md	Rewrote the release instructions to describe the new “create a GitHub release” workflow and how versions are derived from tags and published to PyPI/TestPyPI.
.gitignore	Ignored the generated cortex/_version.py file produced during builds.
.github/workflows/publish_to_pypi.yml	Removed the old tag-based, token-based PyPI publishing workflow.
.github/workflows/publish.yml	Added a new workflow that builds distributions once, uploads them as artifacts, and publishes to PyPI on release events and to TestPyPI on both releases and manual workflow_dispatch runs using trusted publishing.

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