Migrate our python workflow to uv

[Xuanwo]

We use pip install -r requirements.txt in many places. Is there a specific reason for this? If not, would it make sense to switch to uv instead? uv is fast and stable, and it can help us achieve reproducible Python dependencies.

[westonpace]

I think switching to uv would be fine.

[jackye1995]

I always hear uv is great, and I also use it myself (because of the hype), but never got the time to know all the details of why. I think currently we just use requirements.txt in docs and benchmarks, because they might have conflicting dependencies, and people might not be interested in installing all dependencies if they just need to work on one thing. Is that something uv can solve?

[Xuanwo]

I think currently we just use requirements.txt in docs and benchmarks, because they might have conflicting dependencies

I will take a look on this.

But in the worst cases, we can maintain two separate pyproject.toml files, which is no different from our current approaches.

people might not be interested in installing all dependencies if they just need to work on one thing. Is that something uv can solve?

I think we can organize our dependencies into groups: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/dependencies/#dependency-groups

[dependency-groups]
dev = [
  "pytest"
]
lint = [
  "ruff"
]