Repeated calculations

[htjb]

Previously the derivatives, Q, q, and h were calcualted everytime qp_call.fit() but these quantities only need to be calcualted once as they just depend on the functional form of the maximally smooth function and the data.

This adds functions to precompute these quantities outside of qp_class.fit() which will reduce the run time of both the sign flipping and brute force algorithms.

Also replaced requirements.txt and setup.py with a very minimal pyproject.toml and added a version checking workflow.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR reduces repeated computation in the QP fitting loop by precomputing sign-independent matrices/derivative prefactors once, and modernizes packaging by moving to pyproject.toml with a CI version-increment check.

Changes:

• Add precompute_matrices() and refactor qp_class.fit() / DCF.smooth() to reuse precomputed Q, q, h, and derivative prefactors across sign iterations.
• Replace setup.py + requirements.txt with a minimal pyproject.toml, and bump version to 1.2.4 across metadata.
• Add a GitHub Actions workflow + script to enforce version increments on PRs; remove basin-hopping comparison assets.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 12 out of 14 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
maxsmooth/qp.py	Introduces precomputation helpers and uses them inside qp_class.fit() to avoid redundant work.
maxsmooth/DCF.py	Precomputes QP matrices once per run and passes them into repeated qp_class calls.
pyproject.toml	New packaging metadata/dependencies (replacing setup.py / requirements.txt).
setup.py	Removed legacy setuptools configuration.
requirements.txt	Removed legacy dependency list.
maxsmooth/_version.py	Version bump to 1.2.4.
README.rst	Updates documented version string to 1.2.4.
bin/check_version.py	Adds a script to validate version increments versus master.
.github/workflows/version.yml	Adds CI workflow to run version increment checks on PRs to master.
Basin-hopping_Nelder-Mead/*	Removes timing/comparison scripts and data files.

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