Consider how to maintain pixi.lock better for local dev

[TimMonko]

🧰 Task

I have run twice now into problems developing for the docs where I continually use pixi tasks (usually pixi run slimfast-live) to build.

However, it's been twice now that dependencies need updated such taht they are working either on CI or in a different but similar repo (in this case it was napari-sphinx-theme) but not locally. The solution has been pixi update to bring in newer versions of packages.

Perhaps we should be committing the lockfile to this repo, so that pulls from main give the most up to date lockfile. I do always think its a chore to have the diffs show up in PRs though, so I'm not sure if people are maintaining lockfiles via CI? Generally good stuff to think about.

On CI this isn't an issue currently because it uses constraints. So this causes divergence between CI and local as well.

[TimMonko]

@willingc and @Aniketsy say we should commit the lock file 😁

@melissawm, @psobolewskiPhD, and @rensutheart do you have any thoughts?

[melissawm]

I feel like @jaimergp is the right person to have this conversation with 😄

[Czaki]

Did you try to use UV_CONSTRAINTS environment variable that will point to main repo docs constraints?

[jaimergp]

This may be useful if you end up submitting the lock file: https://github.com/Quansight-Labs/conda-metadata-app/blob/main/.github/workflows/update-lockfiles.yml. Example PR: Quansight-Labs/conda-metadata-app#65

[willingc]

@Czaki Is https://github.com/napari/napari/blob/main/resources/constraints/constraints_py3.12_docs.txt the file that would be used to set UV_CONSTRAINT?

A few questions:

1. Does UV_CONSTRAINT work if you are doing local development with Python 3.13 or 3.14?
2. Does UV_CONSTRAINT only work with uv or can pixi pull it in too?

[willingc]

It doesn't look like the current pixi.toml is using the docs constraints for local builds. I see 3.13 as the Python version in the pixi.toml. Would it make sense to make the pixi.toml consistent with the docs constraints file?

[Czaki]

Does UV_CONSTRAINT work if you are doing local development with Python 3.13 or 3.14?

It depends. If the latest version of package that support python 3.12 is supporting also python 3.13 and 3.14 it should work.

There is no reason to provide constraints for python 3.13 and 3.14 if we do not test them. Even if resolver calculate them, it does not mean that they will work.

Does UV_CONSTRAINT only work with uv or can pixi pull it in too?

It looks like it do not work :(.

The more I play pixi the more limited it looks.
For example, constraints could be only provided using pixi.toml
Maybe we should provide a script for generation pixi.toml based on constraints file?

[willingc]

Maybe we should provide a script for generation pixi.toml based on constraints file?

That seems like a good approach.