Run sorcha without forcing reading config file or forced writing results to disk

[yoachim]

For cases where one has several pointing histories and several solar system body populations, it would be useful to loop over those within python and call runLSSTSimulation directly without using the command line and configuration file(s).

• Update so sorchaConfigs is now a subclass of basesorchaConfigs, so if one wants to make a config without reading a file it is possible to with basesorchaConfigs, and sorchaConfigs behaves as before.
• Add return_only kwargs to runLSSTSimulation and PPStats.stats so users are not forced to write output to disk in case they just want the DataFrames returned
• Minor fixes in some other config classes so they work with both reading config files and manual instatiation.

Review Checklist for Source Code Changes

• [ x] Does pip install still work?
• [ x] Have you written a unit test for any new functions?
• [ x] Do all the units tests run successfully?
• [ x] Does Sorcha run successfully on a test set of input files/databases?
• [ x] Have you used black on the files you have updated to confirm python programming style guide enforcement?

[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 72.09302% with 12 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 84.87%. Comparing base (6db2807) to head (8867f09).
⚠️ Report is 9 commits behind head on main.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
src/sorcha/sorcha.py	38.88%	11 Missing ⚠️
src/sorcha/modules/PPStats.py	66.66%	1 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #1181      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   85.08%   84.87%   -0.22%     
==========================================
  Files          69       69              
  Lines        3534     3557      +23     
==========================================
+ Hits         3007     3019      +12     
- Misses        527      538      +11     

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[mschwamb]

@yoachim The team needs to chat internally if we're happy for this to be setup for not running with config files. My worry is it's really easy to forget how you set things up if we allow this. We've also been making a lot of changes for Rubin operations so if we do agree to go this direction, this may PR may be better to be merged when we have the changes in for using real LSST pointing information.

[mschwamb]

Our next call is February 9th. I'll raise this then @yoachim

[yoachim]

@mschwamb sounds good, no particular rush. My main pitch here is that I know astronomers love their config and csv files, but it's good practice to let python users call your python code from within python. And if code is going to run on a cluster it's important to give users control over disk I/O. If I've got 30 pointing histories and 7 solar system populations, I don't want 200+ jobs simultaneously trying to dump observations to disk (which I'm then just going to have to read back in and analyze anyway).

[Little-Ryugu]

Looks nearly good to go. Just a small addition to the docstrings to help future development, and you need to run black version 26.1.0 for the linter.

[Little-Ryugu]

Looks all good to me.