Release v0.3.1

• added support for block comments using /* ... */ and /+ ... +/ - anything between these will get removed (new method: remove_comments)
• added all_plugins() method to ClassRegistry class
• load_user_defined_placeholders now stores the placeholders correctly (fixed incorrect late lambda binding)
• placeholders got rebranded as variables (seppl.placeholders -> seppl.variables)

Release v0.3.0

• added @abc.abstractmethod decorator where appropriate
• added stopped flag to Session to indicate that the execution is over, which is monitored by the seppl.io.execute(...) function
• added wai_logging>=0.0.5 as dependency
• added constants for meta-data types: METADATA_TYPE_STRING, METADATA_TYPE_BOOL, METADATA_TYPE_NUMERIC
• added load_args and save_args methods for loading args from/saving args to files
• the execute(...) method now queries the reader whether it has finished after the first read/yield to allow for dynamically locating files during first call to read() method after initializing the reader
• the placeholders() function (package: seppl.placeholders) now returns the non-input-based ones when outputting input-based ones
• added DataCollector writer, which just collects all the data and makes it accessible
• introduced StreamFilter filters to allow for 1-to-m processing (with m>=0)
• the MultiFilter is now a StreamFilter
• added filter_data generator function and FilterPipelineIterator iterator class for efficiently process data
• the classes_to_str and get_class_name methods can remove builtins. via the clean=True parameter now
• introduced the InifiniteReader mixin which automatically disables batch mode
• added support for caching plugins managed by the ClassRegistry via the ClassCache class (one for each class hierarchy)
• the execute method now supports custom pre-initialization and post-finalization method hooks
• filters output the object ID before processing the incoming data when logging level is set to DEBUG

Release v0.2.21

• the ClassRegistry now supports class listers that list class names (not modules!) to be ignored, i.e., ones that should be returned for their class hierarchies; useful when excluding inherited plugins that are not applicable in the concrete application

Release v0.2.20

• the is_help_requested method can now pinpoint whether global help or help for a specific plugin was requested (requires supplying a list of valid handler names and whether to use partial matching)
• the args_to_objects method now resolves the plugin name and throws an error if it is flagged as unknown

Release v0.2.19

• the write methods of DirectStreamWriter and DirectBatchWriter now have the additional as_bytes parameter, to indicate whether whether to write as bytes or str

Release v0.2.18

• formalized support for direct read from/write to file-like objects with the DirectReader, DirectStreamWriter, DirectBatchWriter mixins

Release v0.2.17

• replaced deprecated pkg_resources with importlib.metadata-based approach
  (based on: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/creating-and-discovering-plugins/#using-package-metadata)

Release v0.2.16

• filters and writers can be skipped now via the --skip flag, making it easy for external scripts to enable/disable pipeline components

Release v0.2.15

• added support to the seppl.io.Splitter class for keeping item/sample groups together via a split_group regular expression
• backported helper methods for seppl.io.Writer classes for managing splitting

Release v0.2.14

• added resume_from parameter to seppl.io.locate_files method which allows to skip all files preceding this glob