build(ci-requirements): create an environment YAML config for CI tests (Ubuntu) #449

[lmmx]

Motivation for these changes

As requested in:

• Use environment.yml (or something like that) in CI #449

Implementation details

You can specify both a package positional argument and (one or more) --file / -f argument which points to a conda format environment yml or traditional txt requirements file.

Initially I just did the Ubuntu test env pointed to in the issue (#449)

Checklist

• Explain motivation and implementation 👆
• Make sure that the pre-commit linting/style checks pass.
• Link relevant issues, preferably in nice commit messages.
• The commits correspond to relevant logical changes. Note that if they don't, we will rewrite/rebase/squash the git history before merging.
• Are the changes covered by tests and docstrings?
• Fill out the short summary sections 👇

Major / Breaking Changes

• N/A

New features

• Use config files to store dependencies not CI (separating state and behaviour)

Bugfixes

• N/A

Documentation

• N/A

Maintenance

• N/A

[jessegrabowski]

@ricardoV94 should we have different yml files for each platform we test on? See here as a template to follow.

[lmmx]

@jessegrabowski I was wondering what to call the dir I put the yml config in! Will change and then review the CI workflow for other platforms to target in the same fashion.

You already have an environment.yml in the top-level dir though so may have to edit other references to that if I move it.

[jessegrabowski]

I'm not sure if that environment.yml is used for much, it looks like docs only from a quick search? I would support getting rid of it entirely.

[lmmx]

I've now covered the benchmark environment and the other numba & jax environment config files too. (09b8a01)

[ricardoV94]

Any issue with putting these inside the .github/workflows directory?

[jessegrabowski]

PyMC puts them in their own folder here; the PR was this way at my recommendation. I guess there's no reason why they couldn't be in the .github folder instead, just for consistency between the packages?

[ricardoV94]

PyMC puts them in their own folder here; the PR was this way at my recommendation. I guess there's no reason why they couldn't be in the .github folder instead, just for consistency between the packages?

PyMC ones are sometimes recommended for devs, but here we are not doing that, so I would keep the root folder uncluttered. Not a strong preference though