Coverage remained the same at 81.773% when pulling 6995ae0 on synapticarbors:patch-1 into ad696e6 on ppannuto:main.

Is it really that necessary / useful to add a new file to the root with a single line in it?

Python has a standard for license management, it's the license key in setup.py, and MIT is a valid SPDX identifier. My instinct is that this is just bloat/cruft, but if there's a compelling reason to add it I suppose I don't really care that much either way.

It is indeed a single file with a single line, but it serves a functional purpose in that it tells the packaging process to include the license file in the source distribution so that it's in the tarball on pypi. Specifying the license in the setup.py as you mentioned only provides metadata about what the license is, but doesn't actually distribute the license. There are several ways to do this, but using a MANIFEST.in is the currently suggested way https://packaging.python.org/guides/using-manifest-in/#using-manifest-in. Other ways include adding a setup.cfg.

I submitted this PR since your package was recently packaged for conda-forge, and there we try to make sure that the license file is included in the source that we distribute to keep with the terms of the license. In the case of the MIT, it states:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.