consider making polars an optional dependency

[dmargala]

The size on disk of a python venv for reframe has ballooned from 54M to 264M between reframe 4.9.3 and 4.10.0, largely due to the addition of polars as a dependency. It'd be nice to keep the runtime requirements minimal so that reframe can be included in minimal base system images or containers without impacting overall size too significantly.

> du -csh reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/* | sort -h | tail -n11
1.2M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/jsonschema
1.3M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/jinja2
2.2M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/ClusterShell
2.7M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/reframe
3.1M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/yaml
9.3M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/polars
11M     reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/setuptools
12M     reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/lxml
13M     reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/pip
202M	reframe-env/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_polars_runtime_32
264M	total

[vkarak]

Yes, we have thought about that and we will plan to make this optional. Maybe we will also remove completely this dependency as we plan to change completely the way the various analytics option work.

[vkarak]

Actually, we can already define it in a separate group, which users can opt-out from in a patch release. This is a uv specific functionality, since PEP 771 which will support default extras is not yet supported.

[dmargala]

Thanks! We don't have uv installed system wide and I'm personally not quite familiar enough with uv env / package management yet to understand how to use it for shared installations of python tools / libraries.

We've been using our system's default python3.6 (SLES base OS) and ReFrame's boostrap.sh install script up till now. I'm testing the new version with non-default system python3.11 + venv + pip:

python3.11 -m venv reframe-env
source reframe-env/bin/activate
pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade pip
pip install --no-cache-dir reframe-hpc==4.10.0

[vkarak]

The nice thing with uv is that it will pull the right python version and the dependencies without having to explicitly create a venv; and it is also fast. You can still use venvs or any other package manager that recognizes pyproject.toml-based projects.

Let us know if you encounter problems with the installation.