vcversioner has seen no update in a few years (and upstream has failed to do anything about it). In the meantime, development around setuptools-scm has been quite active.
The rest of the Python ecosystem is also growing support for setuptools-scm: for instance, `check-manifest`, which I'd like to introduce to our pre-commit hooks, doesn't work at all with vcversioner but supports setuptools-scm without any tweak.
The change from vcversioner to setuptools should be a pretty straightforward search and replace operation. We'll need to replace the `_version` module generated by vcversioner with a call to pkg_resources, as advised in https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/#setuppy-usage.