make the edit_distance package optional

[mr-c]

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[adamnovak]

This makes it less important to have, but it's still in requirements-dev.txt and will still be installed when we install the test-time dependencies.

Does it need to be really optional, where it's not a dependency or it's behind an extra and the tests check for availability before running the test?

Why do you want this to be exactly this amount optional?

[mr-c]

This makes it less important to have, but it's still in requirements-dev.txt and will still be installed when we install the test-time dependencies.

Does it need to be really optional, where it's not a dependency or it's behind an extra and the tests check for availability before running the test?

Why do you want this to be exactly this amount optional?

We don't have edit_distance packaged for Debian, and running the tests without this patch results in a pytest error when it attempts to load this file.

If you want I could add a @pytest.mark.skipif(…) to test_file_hints(); but we don't need it for Debian, -k not test_file_hints is working for us