Added matplotlib and pandas to sandbox requirements

[carsongee]

@sarina @jarvis

We have some residential courses including matplotlib and pandas libraries in their courseware. We would like to add these to the sandbox requirements.

[sarina]

I'm not sure what ramifications new dependencies have on deploys. @cpennington or @e0d or @jarv can you weigh in here?

[e0d]

This may be outside the scope of this PR, but I don't think we can continuously change the sandbox requirements to support the needs of any particular course; I don't think that's sustainable and undermines the sandboxing.

I think we need a clean way to do the following things:

1. Customize the sandbox requirements on a per deployment basis, preferably without forking the repository.
2. Create sandboxes per course.

The first could be accomplished by doing something like establishing a convention for extending the platform. For example, there could be a .edX/ directory in the home of the running user with requirements/sandbox/requirements.txt or some such thing so that any deployer could extend the set of libraries available in the sandbox.

The second would require a way of associating requirements with a course. When course were loaded they could either use the default sandbox virtualenv or, if the course had additional requirements, a new virtual env would be created for the course based on the default sandbox and extended.

[sarina]

@e0d so what do you recommend we do with this PR?

@carsongee how urgent is this need?

[carsongee]

Since it is such a simple change we can cherry pick it for the immediate need if you want to drop this. I agree on the sustainability for sure, and I could maybe direct my energy to solving the issue in the ansible plays instead of the platform directly if we want to make a deployment/configuration problem. I think longterm it would be very cool to fix it inside the platform on a per course basis as that could be a good way to handle per course xblocks down the road as well, but it is probably pretty involved to add that functionality.

[carsongee]

As a fun extra bit of info, this currently won't work on a box from scratch as freetype is required, but is installed by ORA and not edxapp. So this at the very least will require a PR to the config repo as well....Should I close this, and we can maybe add this to a longer term queue of what to do about this issue?

[sarina]

@e0d @carsongee let's get some resolution around this PR, thanks.

[carsongee]

I added requests and moved from post to base. We have a course using symmath (which was already here) on edx.org (12_340), and appears to rely on requests which is causing fails. I asked the course team to follow up with their PM about it, but since this came up here I thought I would add it in before we decide on this one (there may be other requirements missing for that too, but that is the one currently causing a stack trace).

[carsongee]

I just found out that the course we wanted to add matplotlib is planning to be on edx.org this Fall as an FYI: 6.341.

[carsongee]

It looks like 12_340x has worked around this in their courseware, so the need is not immediate. We will still eventually need more libraries so I think we should work towards a solution (even if this simple fix isn't it).

I would also add that if we don't want to add all the dependencies for symmath to the sandbox requirements that we should at least remove symmath so people don't think it is available.

[e0d]

I agree with that sentiment; we should either fully support it or not support it. I'll discuss with product. In the mean time I think we should close the PR.

[carsongee]

Works for me as long as this stays on the radar, maybe something in JIRA?