Re: [apache/incubator-mxnet] [RFC] Apache MXNet 2.0 Roadmap (#16167)

[Felix Hieber]

@szha is there a recent estimate on the timeline for MXNet 2.0? Would you 
recommend to develop downstream toolkits (e.g. Sockeye) against the master 
branch now or rather wait a little bit longer?
Is there already documentation on how to transition MXNet 1.x projects to 2.x?

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Re: RE: Third-party package tests for MXNet nightly builds

[Felix Hieber]

Thank you all for your responses so far.
Sheng, I understand your concerns about tight coupling, but would this
separate CI pipeline really create such a problematic coupling, given that
I was proposing this pipeline to be entirely non-blocking to MXNet?
Monitoring the upstream library (MXNet) would still be up to the
maintainers of downstream projects, as well as the creation of
corresponding issues (and/or fixes). Nevertheless, there would be benefit
from a *timely* (and automated) notification that some recent change in
MXNet broke your tests. This is mostly motivated because the release
process in MXNet is slow, and once a regression is part of a release it
takes quite a while to be removed afterwards.

In my opinion the main question is about resources and ownership. If MXNet
does not want to spend the resources to run tests for downstream projects
on a regular basis, then I agree with you that making the MXNet CI solution
available to other users (maintainers of downstream projects) would indeed
be very useful.

Thanks,
Felix

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 8:58 PM Sheng Zha  wrote:

> Thanks for the proposal, Felix. On one hand, I agree that richer workload
> from the ecosystem helps find issues in MXNet early. On the other hand, I'm
> concerned about tightly coupling the development of projects.
>
> Monitoring the upstream library and addressing problems for upgrading
> dependency should be the concern of the downstream projects. These projects
> own the effort of having proper testing for any changes needed, including
> version upgrade. Having these projects in MXNet CI means the responsibiliy
> of maintaining these projects partly transfers to the MXNet's contributors,
> which doesn't seem right. It blurs the line of who's responsible for
> debugging, isolating the problem, making minimum reproducible sample code,
> and posting the fix.
>
> That said, I think there's much opportunity for reusing the current code
> for MXNet CI. Projects in MXNet's ecosystem would likely benefit from
> MXNet's CI solution so that each individual community project can identify
> issues early. (And from offline chats with Chance and his team members, I
> think this is what's already on their minds.)
>
> -sz
>
> On 2019/02/11 16:46:06, "Zhao, Patric"  wrote:
> > Agree to track the 3rd party packages which make MXNet more prosperous :)
> >
> > Before building the CI, I suggest to create the related labels, like
> sockeye, gluonCV, gluonNLP, etc, in the GitHub and give the high priority
> for these issues/PR.
> > So the issue/PR can be fixed quickly and  these important applications
> would not be blocked again.
> >
> > We can help for the performance/backend/operator related issues as well
> :)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --Patric
> >
> >
> >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Chance Bair [mailto:chanceb...@gmail.com]
> > > Sent: Monday, February 11, 2019 11:28 PM
> > > To: dev@mxnet.incubator.apache.org
> > > Cc: d...@mxnet.apache.org
> > > Subject: Re: Third-party package tests for MXNet nightly builds
> > >
> > > Hi Felix,
> > >
> > > Thank you for the request!  The CI team is currently working on
> improving
> > > our benchmarking platform and will evaluate this request carefully.
> > >
> > > Chance Bair
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 3:59 PM Carin Meier 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > 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  >
> > > > 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 

Third-party package tests for MXNet nightly builds

[Felix Hieber]

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  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
, 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--
   - 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