Switch from conda to venv for development env

[bloomsa]

addresses #1294

Upon doing this, the "happy path" is simpler but overall it feels a little more frail / platform dependent. I'm curious to hear thoughts on that tradeoff or any suggestions people have seen from other repos

[lresende]

Could you elaborate on the why?

[bloomsa]

@lresende beyond what is in issue #1294?

[lresende]

is there a way to make it a choice? instead of one or another?

[kevin-bates]

Or remove this topic altogether. To my earlier point, the environment is up to the dev, so should we even bother with providing these trivial helper methods at all? We can document suggestions, but do we need the make target helpers?

[bloomsa]

We can document suggestions, but do we need the make target helpers?

I like this idea. I can update the docs to include suggestions for both venv and conda, but pull out the make targets altogether. On one hand, it feels kinda wrong to pull out something that already works, but my thinking behind it is that having the targets there makes it seem like conda is the only way to build the local dev environment when that isn't really the case.

Are you both okay with that solution @lresende @kevin-bates

[kevin-bates]

Hi @bloomsa - I apologize for the delay. I'm fine with documenting suggestions. I just don't really see the utility of having helper targets at this point.

@lresende - do you have a strong objection?

[lresende]

@kevin-bates Well, it looks like we have been there:
#1079

And than we came back:
#1108

Do you remember why we had to come back?

[kevin-bates]

It appears we have come full circle. 😄 @bloomsa contributed #1107 to introduce only the helper targets, but then we hit a bit of a snafu due to other changes that #1108 fixed.

Given this, I think we can proceed with removing the helper targets and documenting suggestions for setting up conda/mamba and venv environments - as discussed above.

@lresende, @bloomsa - does this sound like a plan?