Improve CONTRIBUTING.md for Windows and WSL users

[mieslep]

Feature Request

The "getting started as a contributor" should be clear and work for developers on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. This should include base requirements (such as Python version, the recent requirement of uv) as well as OS-appropriate commands in things like Makefile.

Motivation

I'm on Windows, having left Macs circa 2018 for unimportant reasons.

The idea of the Devcontainer should be a stable, cross-platform development environment, but that does not build for me.

So then I tried to make init in Windows, but it expects a number of Unix commands to be present. So then I tried to make init in WSL and it gave errors about pipx not being installed. So I hacked around the Makefile, created a uv venv environment (not documented) and make init ran. But then make backend did not work reliably... it did up until the point I ran make frontend and then the whole thing stopped working.

It should be much easier for me to get a development environment up and running than it has been, and that's before we then address some of the "tips and tricks" for developing and debugging, expectations around unit test updates as part of PR, etc.

But for now, I think we could scope-contain this Feature Request to "get a CONTRIBUTING.md that works for developers on any platform."

Your Contribution

No response

[ogabrielluiz]

Hey @mieslep

That's a very important issue. We are updating contributing docs in this PR: #4415 , maybe we could open a new one soon to build upon it.

[mieslep]

@ogabrielluiz yep that looks definitely better, though Makefile still requires some Unix commands to work. I think it's not unreasonable to expect Windows users to either work from WSL or use a Devcontainer, but those paths need to work too...

[mendonk]

@mieslep Thanks Phil, this is a great call out. This is totally reasonable scope: "get a CONTRIBUTING.md that works for developers on any platform." An update won't happen super soon but I'm adding a ticket to address it when I get a chance.

[ssxlulu]

Well, I also meet some problems when I want to debug the project by Windows vs code devcontainer, I think a document may be helpful for this scene.