installation troubles

[sblunt]

Hey folks! I'm one of the two JOSS reviewers for reggae. Sorry for the delay in getting started with this review! I hope I can help y'all out. I couldn't find your readthedocs page (but I see you're working on it), so for installation I followed your markdown file instructions.

I had trouble getting reggae installed in a fresh conda environment on my mac following the installation instructions, an issue which I've traced to the fact that the version of pbjam on pypi (1.0.0) is not up to date with the most recent github version (1.0.2), and pbjam==1.0.0 fails to install. I was able to fix this by manually cloning and installing pbjam==1.0.2 then retrying the reggae installation.

So, I see two possibilities:

1. encourage the pbjam folks to upload the most recent release to pypi
2. add this workaround of cloning and installing pbjam separately to your installation docs. If you go this route, I'd also suggest adding pbjam>=1.0.2 to your requirements.txt.

One more suggestion on installation: it's generally recommended to use pip install . in a git cloned repo rather than python setup.py install. For developers, you can recommend pip install -e . if desired-- this flag will make it so that changes to the local copy of the code are automatically propagated to the local installation.

openjournals/joss-reviews#6588

[darthoctopus]

Hi Sarah,

We've restructured our requirements.txt to explicitly require pbjam 1.0.3, which is now on PyPI. We have also rewritten our installation instructions to include your suggestion to use pip rather than setup.py.

I have tested that the new instructions work on a fresh python3.10 environment --- unfortunately, pbjam currently has a dependency on a rather old version of scipy, and reggae won't be installable on newer versions of python until pbjam 2 is released. Please try again and let us know if you encounter any issues.

[sblunt]

Sounds great! I'd recommend adding a note that you require python<=3.10 to the install page as well. But otherwise the updated install page looks good to me.

[sblunt]

One more thing-- since jax is one of your dependencies, I think it's worth noting that some of your users may have trouble installing depending on their OS (see here), and you could potentially include a link to the jax install page under an "common installation problems FAQ" or soemthing like that

[darthoctopus]

Hi Sarah,

We've added both a note about python versions, and a section for FAQs with a reference to the jax OS support page, to the installation section of our documentation. Thanks for these suggestions.