Tutorials are largely outdated

[torfjelde]

A lot of the tutorials are unfortunately outdated due to recent improvements in MCMCChains, e.g. TuringLang/Turing.jl#1411.

I'm opening an issue here so as to bring attention to the, well, issue.

[devmotion]

I think maybe it would help to 1) add separate environments for different tutorials (so people can reproduce it even though it is based on an older version of some package) and 2) use CI tests and builds for the tutorials.

[torfjelde]

100%. But for (2), we likely have to move away from Jupyter notebooks, right? Which, honestly, would be it's own benefit.

[torfjelde]

And regarding (1), I would say that ideally we'll always have the tutorials work with the most recent release of Turing, since people will look to this for inspiration when writing their own code.

Maybe we should run Pkg.status() at the beginning or end of every notebook too, so that people can view the dependencies.

[devmotion]

Maybe we should run Pkg.status() at the beginning or end of every notebook too, so that people can view the dependencies.

That's how it is done in SciML: https://github.com/SciML/SciMLTutorials.jl An appendix is added automatically to every tutorial which shows the packages and Julia version that was used to run it

[torfjelde]

That's how it is done in SciML

Nice 👍 And they use jmd as the "base" file?

[devmotion]

Yes. And then notebook, HTML, and PDF files are generated with Weave.

[torfjelde]

Super-dope. Would it be a good idea to just try and duplicate their approach?

[devmotion]

Yes, I think that would be great. In particular also thinking about https://github.com/SciML/RebuildAction which we use over at SciML to rebuild tutorials automatically (together with CompatHelper for individual environments this helps to figure out any possible issues).

[torfjelde]

Yeah I just noticed that; awesome stuff! Cool, well I'm very down for doing that.

[cpfiffer]

All of this is a great idea. I hate the way the tutorials currently work -- they're difficult to write in, difficult to automate, and often out-of-date. Switching to a more general jmd approach is something I'm all for.

[trappmartin]

Super cool idea.

[torfjelde]

I've now updated all the tutorials to work with the new system (which is in a separate branch jmd-staging, which we'll merge into master when everything is ready for a full update).

Do have a look:) We also need an updated script to publish the tutorials. One approach could be to just generate the markdown from the jmd file and then use the current Jekyll setup. Maybe that's a good place to start?

[devmotion]

One approach could be to just generate the markdown from the jmd file and then use the current Jekyll setup. Maybe that's a good place to start?

Yes, I think that's what we should do (at least initially). IMO we should not update too many things in one step 🙂