How do we use uv (the software)?

[Gareth Ma]

Hi all! I saw Tobias mentioning `uv` on another sage-devel thread. I looked into
Sage's commits and saw that we have switched to using `uv` in some of our
workflows as of two weeks ago also by Tobias. Is there any future roadplan for
using it more in Sage? Or do we have to wait for them to support conda first?

[Tobia...@gmx.de]

There is no real roadmap. The low-hanging fruit is to replace all `pip install` in CI with uv to make use of the lock file mechanism.

Moreover, I could imagine the following aim for installing sage from source (without using conda):

1) Install all system packages

2) Run `uv sync` to build (and install) sage

I actually think this may already work if all dependencies can be installed via the system package manager. The long run this may serve as a modern replacement of sage-the-distro. One could also imagine a hybrid version where all missing non-python packages are installed as it's currently done in sage-the-distro, but all python elements are managed by uv.

Further wishlist items that require improvements upstream in uv are:

- Use uv to manage the conda enviroments

- Use uv as a task runner (i.e migrate from tox to uv)

Why do you ask? Do you have any other ideas how we could profit from uv?