Switch to `uv` or `pixi` instead of poetry/tox

[sea-bass]

It's 2025, we can do better.

Marking this as a TODO in case I find time (or others are particularly motivated to give it a try)

[gaileyleseman]

I thought I might take a stab at this, but realized quickly that just updating the pyproject.toml to use uv syntax was not going to be enough ;) I think what makes this switch a little bit more work is that Poetry is not only used in the package definition and tox environments, but also for the devcontainer and Github workflows.

Some questions:

• Since uv does not have an integrated task runner, does that mean that using pixi is preferred (as it uses uv under the hood)? Another option could be using tox-uv to integrate with the existing tox tasks?
• If changes occur when updating packages such as ufmt and flake8, is the preferred workflow to pin those to the specific versions currently in the lockfile or to update the packages in a separate PR and deal with any changes then?
  • And while we are at it, also update to use ruff for both formatting and linting?
• Is there anything tricky to watch out for when updating devcontainers? Is there a risk of breaking existing workflows for users? (Not familiar with this workflow myself)

I might give it another shot later myself, but don't want to 'claim' it yet if anyone else feels like picking up this issue!

[asears]

HI @sea-bass @gaileyleseman I made some of the changes required.

I can help with some of the build and codespaces changes.

Draft PR:
#485

Draft Formatting PR:
#486

There's some dev containers you can find for uv and some patterns here:
https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/docker/#available-images
https://github.com/a5chin/python-uv

There's a rust-just task runner which could replace the makefile and tox.ini
https://github.com/gnpaone/rust-just

ty for type checks (mypy still has some features ty doesn't however this + prek is much faster for pre-commits.)
https://docs.astral.sh/[ty](https://docs.astral.sh/ty/)/
https://prek.j178.dev/

1. Since uv does not have an integrated task runner, does that mean that using pixi is preferred (as it uses uv under the hood)? Another option could be using tox-uv to integrate with the existing tox tasks?
pixi has about 6k stars, though it's a conda upgrade don't see it being a competitor of uv yet, uv has 76k stars.
There still isn't a task runner however rust-just works to replace both tox.ini and makefiles or can stick with tox until uv decides to adopt?

2. If changes occur when updating packages such as ufmt and flake8, is the preferred workflow to pin those to the specific versions currently in the lockfile or to update the packages in a separate PR and deal with any changes then?
And while we are at it, also update to use ruff for both formatting and linting?

In the pr I moved to ruff from flake8 and ruff from ufmt/black/isort.
uv should manage the lockfile.
dependabot should be setup for the repo.
Formatting/linting changes with the upgrade might need to be addressed in separate parallel PRs.

3. Is there anything tricky to watch out for when updating devcontainers? Is there a risk of breaking existing workflows for users? (Not familiar with this workflow myself)

From what I can see, the dev containers install the library and its dependencies.
Similarly, workflows publish a container which can be consumed.
Might be easier to just rebuild if we can understand the intent and use of them.

[sea-bass]

Thanks, folks!

I think since this particular repo is a pure Python project, uv alone should be fine.

Once we get into the py_trees_ros world, though, pixi might prove advantageous because it provides the ability to install ROS packages easily, which uv does not offer.

Critically, once we have uv support I'd be much more comfortable with not even having devcontainers and simply using uv or pixi to manage Python environments as those should be portable enough and much easier to use than poetry/tox.