Why pin runtime dependencies so tightly?

[MarcoGorelli]

Hi,

Looking at the setup.py file, it looks like the following are all required runtime dependencies, all of which need to be pinned very precisely:

requirements = [    "Cython==0.29.23",    "cvxpy==1.1.12",    "fbprophet==0.5",    "holidays==0.9.10",  # 0.10.2,    "ipykernel==4.8.2",    "ipython==7.1.1",    "ipywidgets==7.2.1",    "jupyter==1.0.0",    "jupyter-client==6.1.5",    "jupyter-console==6.",  # used version 6 to avoid conflict with ipython version    "jupyter-core==4.7.1",    "matplotlib==3.4.1",    "nbformat==5.1.3",    "notebook==5.4.1",    "numpy==1.20.2",    "osqp==0.6.1",    "overrides==2.8.0",    "pandas==1.1.3",    "patsy==0.5.1",    "Pillow==8.0.1",    "plotly==3.10.0",    "pystan==2.18.0.0",    "pyzmq==22.0.3",    "scipy==1.5.4",    "seaborn==0.9.0",    "six==1.15.0",    "scikit-learn==0.24.1",    "Sphinx==3.2.1",    "sphinx-gallery==0.6.1",    "sphinx-rtd-theme==0.4.2",    "statsmodels==0.12.2",    "testfixtures==6.14.2",    "tornado==5.1.1",    "tqdm==4.52.0"]

My question is - why pin them so tightly, and are all of them really necessary? E.g. do I really need sphinx-gallery? Such tight pins make it very difficult to integrate into any existing project. Why not just require a lower bound for many/most of these?

[Reza1317]

Hi Marco,

That is a reasonable comment. We wanted to avoid installation issues (when library is installed on its own). Some of which were coming from the requirements for Prophet which we might make optional or remove in future releases. We will also see which requirements are possible to be made less strict. Thanks for the input.

Reza

[MichalChromcak]

Hi Reza,

We recently received a request to add a wrapper for GreyKite as a part of HCrystalBall. I plan to update the new release to prophet>=1.0 and also searching through your codebase, it seems, the migration might be not such a difficult move?

Could you let me know if both - the addition to HCrystalBall is welcomed and whether you'd directly consider prophet 1 over e.g. fbprophet 0.6 in case you would consider updating the dependencies? Would make my life much easier to know.

Or maybe leave the prophet as an optional dependency?

Michal

[husafan]

This is causing problems for me as well.

[wilfreddesert]

I am not sure whether it's related, but trying to do pip install greykite broke my Jupyter installation for me

[MarcoGorelli]

yeah I think as it currently stands the only way to use greykite is to make a new conda environment / virtualenv specially for it :)

[CatChenal]

Why is pystan in the requirements?

[husafan]

@CatChenal - I know PyStan is a prerequisite for Prophet: https://facebook.github.io/prophet/docs/installation.html

[Reza1317]

Yes, I think most of these issues are related to prophet installation. We are working on a solution and it should be resolved in the next release which we hope to publish in a timely fashion. Please stay tuned for an update.

[aks43725]

As an extended question, is there extended usage of FBProphet included? I only see a wrapper class to run Prophet models (yet not the most recent version), which can totally be done by directly calling the Prophet package independently, but didn't find any extended usage. If that's the case, including (FB)Prophet as part of the requirements seems redundant, as it causes major installation issues for this awesome package.

[ahgraber]

Will the next version move from fbprophet to prophet, following the prophet library's name migration?

[KaixuYang]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the comments in this thread. We have just released greykite==0.2.0 on Pypi which

• removes the dependency on fbprophet (it is optional now, but you need to install it manually if you want to use the Greykite wrapper on fbprophet)
• removes dependencies that are not useful during runtime.
• changes pinned dependencies to ranged dependencies.

Hopefully this resolves the installation issues.

[KaixuYang]

@aks43725 The prophet wrapper is an estimator wrapper, allowing it to be used in the Greykite pipeline (including cross-validation, trai/test split, etc.) We changed the fbprophet to optional so you don't need it to install Greykite anymore. And if you have fbprophet==0.5, 0.6, 0.7 it will be compatible, but without some later added parameters in 0.6 or 0.7.

[KaixuYang]

@ahgraber Currently we unpinned fbprophet and the library works with fbprophet==0.5 ,0.6, 0.7 except for a small fraction of later added parameters in fbprophet==0.6, 0.7. We currently don't support prophet==1.0 because it has a different library name. In the long term we might want to support prophet==1.0, but this may not happen in the near future.

[KaixuYang]

Please see greykite==0.2.0. This issue is resolved. Thanks everyone!

[ahgraber]

@ahgraber Currently we unpinned fbprophet and the library works with fbprophet==0.5 ,0.6, 0.7 except for a small fraction of later added parameters in fbprophet==0.6, 0.7. We currently don't support prophet==1.0 because it has a different library name. In the long term we might want to support prophet==1.0, but this may not happen in the near future.

Thanks for the update. I believe the limitation on prophet==1.0 will prevent greykite + prophet compatibility with python 3.9. Regardless, looking forward to this update!