Pyro: conda support in the future

[CompRhys]

My research group is looking at whether to use pyro vs gpflow for a new project, I am inclined towards pyro due to prefering pytorch to tensorflow.

However, for ease of workflow our PI is very keen on ensuring that we use conda for maintaining environments within the group now that the HPC cluster we have access to has adopted conda. Would it be possible to get a conda release of pyro-ppl?

[fehiepsi]

You can use pip in conda to install pyro, so I guess there is no need to have a conda release at this alpha stage. Writing a conda build receipt for pyro is easy so I think that pyro's devs will make it available in the next version of pyro.

[fritzo]

Sure, we'll plan to publish our upcoming 0.3 release on both pypi and conda. ETA just after PyTorch 1.0 release around NIPS.

[CompRhys]

My hand may be forced before then but that’s great to know! Thanks for your work

[jpchen]

what is the difference between pip installing and conda installing in your conda environment? as @fehiepsi said, i use them interchangeably and observe no difference. if you conda list you can see all your installed packages from both conda and pip.

[fritzo]

@jpchen what is the difference between pip .. and conda

I don't understand fully, but I believe conda indstall torch can install a more system-tailored version of torch than pip install torch. And if we want to trigger that conda install via ___ install pyro, we would also need to publish a conda package. If this is not the case, then we can simply ask conda users to use our pip package, e.g.

# in environment.yml
name: some_conda_package
dependencies:
- torch
- pip:
  - pyro

[fritzo]

@CompRhys Can you give us some specific reasons to create a conda package, rather than simply using -pip -pyro in your environment.yml file?

[CompRhys]

Sadly it's just group politics, in trying to pre-empt issues I thought it might be used as a reason not to swap.

[jpchen]

@CompRhys i think you're misunderstanding or i'm misunderstanding. for your intended purpose, pip installing inside your env is _completely indistinguishable_ from a dependency perspective from conda installing.

[CompRhys]

@jpchen I have already used pyro as described for personal tests, this was a simple quality of life inquiry for non-technical potentially irrational reasons.

[fehiepsi]

I make a conda receipt here for any one want to build pyro from conda (or submit to conda-forge). :)