Update building, testing routines?

[trappitsch]

This has been on my mind for a while... Should we update the building and testing backend?

Proposition:

• Migrate building to uv
  • Migrate to pyproject.toml for instrument, optional, and dev deps
  • Add lock files so we can easily dep changes in failing workflows (for problems like in Fix LCC25 voltage min step value to 1mV #451)
• Install python and deps in CI via uv (speedup)
• Update release workflow
• Update readthedocs workflow
• Update readme for installation
• Update docs to agree with readme

Just an idea :)

[scasagrande]

I use uv for a lot of stuff, but I'm hesitant here. Testing is already pretty quick, and I'm a little hesitant to switch to something that isn't community owned when we don't really need the performance.

To be clear I use uv for a lot of stuff in my day job, but there I really really benefit from the performance improvements.

The lockfile is more complex. Its useful for keeping ci chugging along, but we also want to surface problems that users might encounter.

Everything else is fine though

[scasagrande]

okay, fixed a bunch. Now there's some space for updating content :)

Test suite is revealing some warnings from python-ivi/python-usbtmc and python-ivi/vxi11 where some regex.re calls need their arguments converted to raw strings.

[trappitsch]

Cool, thanks for these changes! Fair point with uv!
For those regex issues, that is directly linked to #429 for python-vxi11 and usbtmc... For and bring up a fork might still be the way to go there... seems there have been no changes on either of those packages...

[trappitsch]

One more tiny thing that I find useful: what do you think of adding the rtd page as the link in the repo about (to right part there)? otherwise, this is basically good to close :) thanks!

[scasagrande]

didn't even notice we could put a link there! will do right now

[scasagrande]

done!