Can't speak for the CI team, but in general I think that it is good idea. On a separate note, I've been playing around with Sockeye recently and it's great! Awesome work and glad to see MXNet used for such cutting edge use cases. I'd love to see closer collaboration with the Sockeye team and MXNet for innovation, cross pollination, and evangelization of what MXNet can do .
Best, Carin On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 6:01 AM Felix Hieber <felix.hie...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello dev@, > > > > I would like to ask around whether there is interest in the community to > test nightly builds of MXNet with third-party packages that depend on MXNet > and act as early adopters. The goal is to catch regressions in MXNet early, > allowing time for bug fixes before a new release is cut. > > > > For example, Sockeye <https://github.com/awslabs/sockeye> is a customer of > new MXNet releases and aims to upgrade to latest MXNet as soon as possible. > Typically, we update our dependency on MXNet once a new release becomes > available (through pip). However, there have been cases where new releases > of MXNet introduced regressions undetected by MXNet tests (hence passing > the release process): the latest example is this issue > <https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/13862>, which may have > been introduced already back in October, but, due to infrequent MXNet > releases, has only surfaced recently and will most likely force us to wait > for a post or 1.4.1 release. In this particular example, Sockeye’s tests > would have detected this, and the issue could have been created already in > October, potentially avoiding its presence in the 1.4.0 release. > > > > More generally, I think there are several third-party packages with > valuable test suites (e.g. gluon-nlp) that can contribute to catching MXNet > regressions or incompatibilities early. Running these test suites for each > and every PR or commit on the MXNet main repo would be too much overhead. > My proposal would be to trigger these tests with the nightly builds (pip > releases) of MXNet in a separate CI pipeline that is able to notify the 3p > maintainers in a case of failure, but does not block MXNet development (or > nightly build releases) in any way. > > Roughly it would do the following: > > - pip install mxnet--<date> > - for each 3p package that is part of the pipeline: > - clone/setup up package > - run unit/integration tests of package with some timeout > - in case of failure, notify package owner > > > > I am not familiar with the current CI pipelines, their requirements and > resources. It would be great if someone from the CI team could chime in and > evaluate whether such a proposal seems doable and worthwhile. > > > > Best, > > Felix >
