setting up a development environment is difficult

[ned2]

I recently spun up a dev environment for contributing a PR to plotly.py and ran into some issues that I think can be addressed fairly readily.

1. pytest is pinned to 3.5.1 in packages/python/plotly/optional-requirements.txt and this version simply didn't run, failing with an internal TypeError. I upgraded it to 7.4.2 and it worked. Is there a reason its pinned to such an old version? can this be unpinned?
2. contributing.md does not currently mention the dependancy on Plotly Orca. I was rather surprised to come back to all my tests failing, and somewhat hilariously the orca Ubuntu screen reader reading a large chunk of Pytest's terminal output to me. Just adding an external dependency in the testing section would do the trick I reckon.
3. There were a number of missing packages required by optional tests that aren't in packages/python/plotly/optional-requirements.txt so those tests failed. The following packages need to be added: polars vaex scikit-image statsmodels pyarrow

btw for 1,the error thrown by pytest 3.5.1 is:

  File "/home/ned/.pyenv/versions/3.11.6/envs/book/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_pytest/assertion/rewrite.py", line 332, in _rewrite_test
    co = compile(tree, fn.strpath, "exec", dont_inherit=True)
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: required field "lineno" missing from alias

[ned2]

happy to submit a PR btw @alexcjohnson

[alexcjohnson]

Thanks @ned2 - the root of this I suspect is that CI doesn't use packages/python/plotly/optional-requirements.txt at all, instead it uses the files in https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py/tree/master/packages/python/plotly/test_requirements - which are themselves a bit out of date, if it even makes sense for all those reqs to be pinned, and we should really be testing up to 3.11 at this point, but I digress. At least these requirements (plus the circleci config for at least orca) are known to run the tests, whereas packages/python/plotly/optional-requirements.txt is only used manually - ideally I'd prefer to remove that (and packages/python/plotly/requirements.txt) entirely and just point people to packages/python/plotly/test_requirements, assuming there are simple instructions that get you up and running via those files.

A PR would be lovely 🙇