[bgunebakan]

Summary of the changes / Why this is an improvement

The macOS test jobs fail randomly in the CrateLayer tests, for example in https://github.com/crate/crate-python/actions/runs/40619105323/job/122588489678. The logs are also hard to read, because pytest prints the captured output of every passing test.

This PR fixes flakiness of the TestLayer and enable caching for crateDB for faster run time. and reduces verbose to have clean pipeline logs.

What changed?

• Biggest change is log size, run logs dropped 4,815 → 970 lines −80%, retry warnings 1,030 → 0
• macos-latest job run dropped 6.0 → 4.0 min, −33% difference
• Runner time per run (all 8 jobs) 21.2 → 15.4 min, −27% difference
• Log quality is improved, the fix get rid of the retry logs
• Bug found and fixed. When crate_config pointed to a directory, CrateLayer passed that directory's parent to CrateDB as path.conf.

Checklist

• Link to issue this PR refers to (if applicable): Fixes #???