Yawning-Titan Dependency Update: Navigating setuptools, pip, gym, gymnasium and Ray RLlib

[ChrisMcCarthyDev]

I wanted to bring everyone up to date on some dependency issues that affect the installation of Yawning-Titan:

1. From Setuptools 67, malformed version strings will fail to install. Gym version 0.21.0, one of the Yawning-Titan dependencies, has some malformed dependency strings. As a result of this, installing Gym 0.21.0 with Setuptools version < 67 fails. This has forced us to need to "downgrade" Setuptools to version 66 before installing Yawning-Titan.
2. Pip dropped support for defaulting to install from the legacy setup.py file after the wider adoption of the pyproject.toml file. This meant that overnight, packages that didn’t have a pyproject.toml file and were using the legacy setup.py file for install config were prevented from being installed using the latest versions of Setuptools. We were ahead of this with the Yawning-Titan package and had implemented the pyproject.toml file. Unfortunately, all but one of our dependencies had a working pyproject.toml file; the “non-compliant” package was Gym. As a result of this, to install Yawning-Titan, we need to “downgrade” to older versions of Pip (23.0.1) that will install Gym using its setup.py file. This was reported back in March 2023 (see: Yawning-Titan install failing due to Gym not compatible with setuptools>=67 #44)
3. Although Gym is no longer in development and has made way for its successor, Gymnasium, we still have to use it. This is because upgrading to a specific version of Gymnasium would mean all our dependencies would also need to be aligned and have a dependency on a working version of Gymnasium. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Ray still has a dependency on Gym. As a result of this, we still need to use Gym and an older version of Stable Baselines3 which supports the same version of Gym.
   This all really all hangs on Ray upgrading to Gymnasium >= 0.28.0. Once done, we can drop support for Gym. Yawning-Titan will then have a direct dependency on Gymnasium. We'll then be able to upgrade Stable Baselines3 to the latest version. At this point, we'll also drop the need to downgrade to older versions of Setuptools and Pip. The issues have been raised in the Ray GitHub repo requesting upgrade to Gymnasium 0.28.0 Ray has responded and the work has been completed and merged in, but they are yet to release it. We're hoping to be notified of a release very soon.

In the interim, Yawning-Titan can be installed by following the strict install script in the release notes. The install scripts create a dedicated and isolated Python virtual environment with downgraded versions of Pip and Setuptools before installing the released Yawning-Titan wheel. See the latest Yawning-Titan v2.0.1 release notes: https://github.com/dstl/YAWNING-TITAN/releases/tag/v2.0.1

We understand the inconvenience these dependency issues may cause, and we are committed to monitoring the situation closely. We appreciate your understanding and patience as we await the release from Ray and continue to ensure Yawning-Titan remains accessible and functional. Should you have any queries, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Yawning-Titan dev team!

[ChrisMcCarthyDev]

This a quick update from the Yawning-Titan Dev Team to say that Ray RLlib(versions >= 2.7.0) now supports Gymnasium v0.28.1. With both Stable Baselines3 and Ray RLlib now aligned on the same version of Gymnasium, we can move forward with #4 Add support for the new OpenAI Gym step API interface. It is on our backlog and will be progressed soon.