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Update the Zamba installation instructions #246

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AllenDowney opened this issue Nov 14, 2022 · 3 comments
Open

Update the Zamba installation instructions #246

AllenDowney opened this issue Nov 14, 2022 · 3 comments
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docs enhancement New feature or request good first issue Good for newcomers

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@AllenDowney
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AllenDowney commented Nov 14, 2022

Current the installation instructions require substantial expertise to follow

https://zamba.drivendata.org/docs/stable/install/

Since we have a Makefile in the repo, I wonder if we should advise users to use the Makefile.

@ejm714
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ejm714 commented Nov 15, 2022

Can you say more about which parts require substantial expertise? The pip install is a one line command. Is it the ffmpeg piece that feels trickiest?

@AllenDowney
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This is based on my initial reaction, from the POV of a hypothetical user: when I read that page, I had no confidence I would be able to get a working environment set up.

The Makefile uses conda to install cudatoolkit and cudann, then pip to install the other requirements. For someone following the instructions in the docs, I wondered how they would handle this (or know to handle it). Now I see that there are instructions at the end, but I wonder if we'd want to change the order to install CUDA first?

Also, one issue that I ran into (despite my using the Makefile): I have a GPU but did not have the driver working successfully, so cudatoolkit installed successfully, but Zamba did not find my GPU. It might be good to provide instructions for users to check the configuration of the GPU (using tools like nvidia-smi) before they start the install.

Anyway, these are mostly notes as I go through the process. Whether and when we want to make changes in the docs depends in part on who we imagine is installing Zamba locally (as opposed to using Zamba cloud).

@jayqi
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jayqi commented Mar 3, 2023

Some ideas that are relevant and may improve the situation:

  • Publish a wheel when we release. Right now, pip is being pointed to a repository clone tar.gz source distribution. It doesn't make a huge difference, but it would reduce the number of steps that pip runs when a user needs to pip install zamba.
  • Publish zamba to PyPI. Apparently we used to do this but stopped? Then users could just pip install zamba. EDIT: Found PyPI release is not possible with direct references #160
  • Publish zamba to conda-forge. Then you could easily conda install zamba and potentially get other dependencies like ffmpeg and CUDA-related stuff automatically.

@klwetstone klwetstone added enhancement New feature or request docs good first issue Good for newcomers labels Apr 17, 2024
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