New release 1.5 broke some downstream code

[tomMoral]

Hello,

Thanks for this nice optimization package. We are developing a framework for automatic benchmarking of optimization libraries called benchopt where we included modopt for the lasso (with the help of @zaccharieramzi ). I just wanted to report here that the latest release 1.5 broke our down stream code for two reasons:

• The API changed without deprecation warning cycle. When 1.5 was released, data changed in a lot of places to input_data. software development best practices would have been to support both data and input_data for at least one release, with deprecation warning to make sure downstream code can be updated without breaking it. It is not a very big deal but at least mentionning the change in the what's new would be nice.

• We also realized that the requirements impose pinned version of the dependencies like numpy. This tends to break compat with many other packages installed in a distribution and should be avoided if possible. At least using something like 1.19 would already help a lot instead of even pinning the release number. It would be nice to remove the pinned version from the requirement file.

I think fixing this and making sure to keep a stable API would make the package more robust for users. hope this can help for future development! :)

[sfarrens]

Hi @tomMoral, thanks for the feedback it is very much appreciated.

• The API issue is 100% my fault and fell through the cracks as I rushed to get the last release finished on time, so sorry about that.
• The pinned dependencies was deliberate as we were aiming to keep all of PySAP consistent and still maintain support for Python 3.6. I will take another look at this and see if I can keep everything stable with minimum rather than fixed package versions. If so, I can release a patch for this.

[agramfort]

@sfarrens what is common practice is to have CIs that run both the minimal dependencies and the current stable. Pinning dependencies will lead to situations where 2 software are simply incompatible in the same environment.

[sfarrens]

@sfarrens what is common practice is to have CIs that run both the minimal dependencies and the current stable. Pinning dependencies will lead to situations where 2 software are simply incompatible in the same environment.

I will look into this, thanks @agramfort!

[sfarrens]

Pinned dependencies removed in #189

[tomMoral]

🙏 nice, we will be able to update our benchmarks to include back ModOpt.
Thanks!