Progress towards Conda distribution

[madeline-scyphers]

We are building a package that relies on Ax, and in the Ax's documentation it specifically says to use pip, even if you are using Conda as your package manager. But all of Ax's underlying packages (BoTorch, GPyTorch, and PyTorch all recommend using Conda instead. Conda itself recommends avoiding mixing pip with conda installs if it can be avoided since its dependency solver doesn't work as well that way, and it does all of its dependency solving with the conda packages first with no knowledge of how the pip packages will come and overwrite those earlier dependency requirements. This is an issue right now where we are trying to pin pytorch above a version in conda, but ax in pip is using a cached lower version and overwriting it to lower than the pinned version.

I know adding a Conda distribution is on the wishlist #566 and this issue #614 added a distribution that is getting released. I am not sure how much y'all are working towards making that the main recommended distribution, but it is also not up to date with your current release. Which also means we can't upgrade to the latest version of Ax and unpin our pandas version (#1153) if we were to switch to using Ax from that Conda distribution to solve the problems I mentioned above.

Thanks for any insights and progress updates.

[danielcohenlive]

Hi @madeline-scyphers, do you have a specific timeline when you would need this by? Is this currently a blocker for your project?

[madeline-scyphers]

It's not a blocker, just something that we work around. Ax is the only package in our non dev packages that is installed through pip, making the dependency solver trickier, and something that has gone awry, especially when rebuild envs. So no timeline when we need this by, it would just be nice and we were curious about the progress of it since it is on the wishlist and the conda distro that a user put up isn't up to date.

[danielcohenlive]

I added a high pri task to bump this, but we still don't have a specific timeline.

[madeline-scyphers]

I was wondering if I could get a followup on this. Last word was about the adding a high priority task on Oct 11 from @danielcohenlive. And then on Oct 26 the issue was marked as completed and closed, but I don't see any new instructions on the docs or a new package on the pytorch channel or any difference on the conda forge feedstock repo indicating anything has happened. I gave it a few weeks since it was closed in case any update was waiting to be merged still, but I don't see that either. So I am just wondering what the status of this is. Thanks for the info!

[Balandat]

@madeline-scyphers sorry for the lack of updates here. While https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/ax-platform is not our official conda release, it seems to have picked up our latest release just a few days after it was tagged on github. So hopefully this unblocked you for the time being.

@danielcohenlive what was the reason this was closed?

[danielcohenlive]

@Balandat that was a mistake. It probably shouldn't have been closed

[lena-kashtelyan]

Putting this on the wishlist for now as I'm not sure when this will happen.