Feature request: Publish elmclient to PyPI with regular releases

[filhocf]

Summary

Request to publish elmclient to PyPI more frequently and with a predictable release cadence, so users can reliably pip install elmclient and get recent fixes.

Current Situation

• The latest version on PyPI appears to be older than what's on the master branch (currently at 0.37.0 on GitHub)
• Users who need recent bug fixes (e.g., the XML pretty-printing fix from PR fix: XML pretty-printing crash for non-ASCII in httpops #123) must install directly from git: pip install git+https://github.com/IBM/ELM-Python-Client.git
• There's no CI/CD pipeline for automated PyPI publishing

Proposal

1. Publish the current 0.37.0 to PyPI so users get the latest fixes
2. Consider adding a GitHub Actions workflow for automated publishing on tagged releases
3. Adopt a release cadence (e.g., publish after each version bump)

Example GitHub Actions workflow

A simple workflow that publishes to PyPI on tagged releases:

name: Publish to PyPI
on:
  push:
    tags: ['v*']
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: '3.12'
      - run: pip install build twine
      - run: python -m build
      - run: twine upload dist/*
        env:
          TWINE_USERNAME: __token__
          TWINE_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.PYPI_TOKEN }}

Why This Matters

Downstream projects (including MCP servers, automation tools, and CI pipelines) depend on elmclient being available and up-to-date on PyPI. Installing from git is fragile for production use.

We're happy to contribute a PR with the GitHub Actions workflow if that would help.

[barny]

Sorry my bad - was in a hurry before 2.5 week absence and didn't publish. Will do that shortly.