Would it be useful to provide a pre-defined development environment as a devcontainer?

[MusicalNinjaDad]

To make my life easier when contributing to Pyo3 I put together a devcontainer with the required development tools, python headers etc.

For those who are not aware Development Containers are a combination of a Dockerfile and a configuration json which provide a full development environment in a Docker container for a specific project. They are very well integrated with VSCode, intelliJ and are the backbone of github codespaces.

To use one you just need to install docker on your system and the relevant extension in your IDE. The system will then download/build and run a container with rust, python, python headers, nox, lychee, llvm-cov, ... and automatically install the relevant add-ons in your IDE (rust-analyzer, ruff, etc.) While that may sound complex the developer ergonmics are phenomenal and it is soooo much easier than manually installing and experimenting based on high-level info in contributing.md

This keeps your underlying system "clean" of all the specific toolchain requirements for any OSS project and makes it really easy to get up and running with a well-installed development environment.

There are two basic ways to provide a container:

1. Directly in the main repo. Pros: contributors would also be able to open their forks online as a github codespaces; anyone with the extension already installed will get a toastie pop-up when opening the repo in IDE. Cons: it would need maintaining in the main codebase and have a very official character.
2. As a separate repo. Pros: it is not formally part of the official main codebase; can be leveraged to develop other projects which need the same toolchain - e.g. those which use Pyo3 as a library. Cons: harder to set up - contributors need to clone both repos into a common root and open that; leads to a local directory structure where the main codebase is stored under projectroot/pyo3 rather than pyo3 being the project root

I'm happy to share my container with better documentation or to offer it here as a PR, if that would be valuable to the community. It's currently at MusicalNinjaDad/devcontainers-python-rust

I hope I'm not stepping on log-term contributors and maintainers toes with this poll. If I am, please let me know and I'll back off...