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Documentation for trying the development version of Astropy ignores virtual environments #11207
Description
Description
I am trying to contribute to AstroPy. The tutorial, "Try the Development Version"
https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/development/workflow/get_devel_version.html#get-devel
shows a method to switch over to the development version, but warns against doing so, and says that using python virtual environments is a much better choice. It then links to a general article about virtual environments for astropy, https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/development/workflow/virtual_pythons.html#virtual-envs, that doesn't help with the specific case of making a virtual environment for astropy development testing.
It would be much better if the "Try the development version" tutorial just showed how to do so using virtual environments, since that's the recommended method.
Activity
pllim commentedon Jan 4, 2021
Indeed, the dev docs need updating. Everyone has their own favorite envs, so it is tough to cover all the basis. Perhaps @embray can advise here.
In addition, I would recommend replacing "stable" with "latest" in the URLs above to ensure you obtain the latest instructions.
In the meantime, if you need help, feel free to reach out to us on Astropy Slack.
janerigby commentedon Jan 5, 2021
From @taldcroft on Slack:
conda create -n astropy-dev python=3.7 conda activate astropy-dev cd ~/git/astropy # my git clone pip install pytest-astropy pip install -e '.[test,all,docs]' # Quotes needed for zshmhvk commentedon Jan 6, 2021
As @pllim noted, part of the problem is that there are so many options used even between ourselves. As most testing is done with
tox, I've slowly been moving towards that and even have #10394 with a description for setup using that...embray commentedon Jan 16, 2021
I agree though that for development you should absolutely use one of
This should be clarified. If there are other options, people already using those options can be presumed to know what they're doing so it doesn't need to be an exhaustive list. venv comes with Python 3 so it is the easiest, and should be by default part of the instructions, with mentions also of virtualenv and conda for those already using them.