Clean up repo for first ASF release (Attempt 2)

[cswartzvi]

Hi all - I was looking through the codebase to help create the first ASF release (#1336) and thought we might benefit from a little clean-up. Please have a look and let me know if I went too far with anything - happy to roll things back!

NOTE: This is a follow-up to the closed issue #1371

Changes

• Moved top-level images to new assets folder. Do we need to keep these?
• Moved top-level md files to either docs or writeups. Maybe these should be fully integrated with the docs?
• Deleted setup.py, removing the legacy Python packaging script and related logic
• Remove unused configuration files (.style.yapf, .flake8, ...)
• Update manifest (remove non-existent requirements files)
• Update min required python to 3.8.1. This allows contributors to use uv sync without allowing prereleases (as per the last meetup, I would like bump the min required python to 3.9 next)
• Update uv configuration. Since pip now has support, I moved dev dependencies to dependency-groups (PEP 735)
• Fix broken tests (maybe out of scope for this PR)

How I tested this

No changes to codebase

Notes

N/A

Checklist

• PR has an informative and human-readable title (this will be pulled into the release notes)
• Changes are limited to a single goal (no scope creep)
• Code passed the pre-commit check & code is left cleaner/nicer than when first encountered.
• Any change in functionality is tested
• New functions are documented (with a description, list of inputs, and expected output)
• Placeholder code is flagged / future TODOs are captured in comments
• Project documentation has been updated if adding/changing functionality.

[cswartzvi]

@skrawcz - using a branch on the main repo (and not from my fork) seems to have fixed the issue with the failing docs action.

[jernejfrank]

Looks great, just a minor comment from my side.

[jernejfrank]

Just a heads up, that this PR requires using pip 25.1 which added installing groups, but also dropped support for python 3.8, so we should work towards droppng support for py38.

[cswartzvi]

@jernejfrank, thanks for taking a look. I completely agree with you regarding dropping py38 support. Originally, I was going to include that in this PR, but it started to feel like mission creep. Changing the minimum to 3.8.1 was just enough to get uv sync working reliably without using prereleases (which was also causing issues).

I am going to open another PR after this one that drops py38 support - provided there are no objection from the other members of the PMC team.

[jernejfrank]

That sounds good to me, also feel it is better to separate it out into another PR!

[skrawcz]

@cswartzvi please add a nice squash commit message to mention and relevant decisions you made here :)