Could we use uv for building the users guide?

[philderbeast]

Could we use uv for making our users guide?

It can manage Python versions and is a drop-in replacement for pip with its uv pip command. It can also be used with read the docs.

[ulysses4ever]

I heard good things about uv but otherwise I'm ambivalent.

[ulysses4ever]

Of course, the other side of it is the usual argument: if it didn't break, didn't fix it…

[geekosaur]

I guess my question is, do we really gain anything (especially considering the number of playing-around commits I'm seeing in the PR)?

[philderbeast]

@ulysses4ever I too have seen positive comments about uv. The current cabal makefile recipes did break for me, #11020. I was able to fix this with #11379 but thought perhaps uv could help with python versions and developer experience.

Very quickly I was able to get our makefile to build the users guide locally by naively replacing pip with uv pip. After a bit of iteration (apologies for notification churn), I have managed to get read-the-docs to build our html users guide using uv with #11382.

From this experience, I can say some advantages of uv are:

• The makefile is shorter.
• We don't have to explicitly activate a python virtual environment, either in the shell or in our makefile.
• A clean git clone can make users-guide without first make users-guide-requirements.

I found the uv docs to be good as were the discussions on their issues.

[ulysses4ever]

@philderbeast this sounds a bit more convincing than "let's try the new shiny thing", so I'd be in favor.