Currently we have multiple locations where we need to set the version manually (DESCRIPTION, News.md, configure and configure.ac, others?) in addition to the version we set via git tag.

The goal would be to streamline the process of bumping the version, ideally designating one source for the version and have all other mentions be generated automatically.

As @matteodelucchi pointed out, usethis::use_version() might be a solution.
If there does not exist an implementation already that suites our needs, we might also implement this via templating (e.g. with https://github.com/davidchall/jinjar/).

In addition to streamlining the version-bumping process we might also consider to adhere to semver versioning scheme.

Steps

1. Evaluate if usethis::use_version() allows to fetch the the version number from a git tag and set it in every location we mention the package version.
2. Implement the process of setting the version number based on the last git tag. (Either with usethis::use_version() or from scratch)