Pachi: request for removal

[lemonsqueeze]

brew config AND brew doctor output OR brew gist-logs <formula> link

Hi, I am Pachi current maintainer.
Follow up to https://github.com/pasky/pachi/issues/174
suggested action: removal

Verification

• My brew doctor output says Your system is ready to brew. and am still able to reproduce my issue.
• I ran brew update and am still able to reproduce my issue.
• I have resolved all warnings from brew doctor and that did not fix my problem.
• I searched for recent similar issues at https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues?q=is%3Aissue and found no duplicates.
• My issue is not about a failure to build a formula from source.

What were you trying to do (and why)?

Hi, I am Pachi current maintainer.

As explained in pasky/pachi#174 homebrew cannot build Pachi as caffe is a hard requirement and caffe has been removed from homebrew.

Current formula doesn't follow instructions in INSTALL.md and misuses a dev build that is not for distribution, leading to a useless build that nobody wants. We do not recommend anyone install Pachi on MacOS through homebrew because of that.

Removing Pachi from homebrew seems the sensible thing to do, unless you want to stick to old binaries with a big fat warning in the description that this is a very limited dev build that was never meant for distribution, is untested and doesn't represent the current state of the project (or past state for that matter).

This is the last time I attempt to remedy the abysmal quality of the relations homebrew has had with this project. Failure to take appropriate action will result in homebrew being treated as a hostile project and its requests rejected as spam.

What happened (include all command output)?

Current build should never have been allowed, it doesn't follow instructions.

What did you expect to happen?

Homebrew hasn't provided a single decent Pachi in the last 10 years. I would have expected someone to notice, ask for feedback, or at least take appropriate action when this was first reported.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions (by running brew commands)

brew install pachi

[MikeMcQuaid]

Thanks for the issue!

leading to a useless build that nobody wants

People with analytics enabled are still installing this so I don't agree here.

with a big fat warning in the description that this is a very limited dev build that was never meant for distribution

We can add caveats explaining the ways in which this build is limited. Could you detail this a bit for us?

I'd suggest that you consider making the pachi build process fatal unless caffe is installed.

This is the last time I attempt to remedy the abysmal quality of the relations homebrew has had with this project. Failure to take appropriate action will result in homebrew being treated as a hostile project and its requests rejected as spam.

The last issue was created by a Homebrew contributor, not a maintainer. We cannot control what random contributors say.

Can we try to cool things down here? You're on our issue tracker now, we're all volunteers here and we're all trying to do the best by our users and projects.

A reasonable middle ground here may be to add caffe as a resource in the formula so e.g. the pachi formula builds its own caffe and we used that.

[MikeMcQuaid]

I read all the previous issues and I apologise that:

A reasonable middle ground here may be to add caffe as a resource in the formula so e.g. the pachi formula builds its own caffe and we used that.

Was what you'd proposed 3 years ago and rejected then. I think we can consider it now instead.

[MikeMcQuaid]

I also want to note that us not having remove this yet it not anything specific to you or your project but instead our (mostly unwritten) policy that we don't remove things just because upstreams ask us to. I've updated the written policy here for clarity all round in future.

[GunniBusch]

Homebrew hasn't provided a single decent Pachi in the last 10 years. I would have expected someone to notice, ask for feedback, or at least take appropriate action when this was first reported.

As I am the person who opened the issue you referenced I want to address this:

First, the issue I opened, was primarily because I wanted to know if the latest stable release announced on your website is indeed stable, as it is a pre release on GitHub. (I went with the website, as I haven't got any actual response from you regarding the actual question).

Second, I explicitly asked you if there is an alternative that can be used. (maybe there are maintained compatible forks, or caffe2 from PyTorch could be used). Yes, I could have been more specific, but calling "homebrew" toxic, is a bit far from reality. IMHO to declare a project/community toxic, requires at least either insults from maintainers or larger group of fans/contributors. Homebrew (maintainers) in fact are often more then (required) forgiving regarding people that insult staff and even then they still not immediately stop the discussion.

And maybe the fact that homebrew values up to date packages (formulae), and actually is on repology the pm with the most up to date packages (percentage wise), has some minor effects on a handful of formulae, that have features missing due to compatibility.

[lemonsqueeze]

Thanks for the constructive feedback.

I value homebrew's mission and certainly respect the magnitude of the difficulty of coordinating a project like this. I'm sure this is an isolated case, but to be honest I was about to give up on homebrew seeing that after all this time nothing could be done to resolve a simple situation like this. It's been pretty unreal, I wish there was better communication.

I'd suggest that you consider making the pachi build process fatal unless caffe is installed.

I've been thinking about that also, that would remove any misuse possibility. We've been trusting humans with the build so far. It is sad to see this build option go as it is quite useful from a development perspective, but may be best going forward.

We can add caveats explaining the ways in which this build is limited. Could you detail this a bit for us?

I touched on it in pasky/pachi#174, basically DCNN (neural network) support was added in 2016 so people are going to expect it from a modern build. It makes a huge difference in playing style and strength, going from weak amateur to strong amateur level with neural network support. A lot of features in recent releases are also missing without it which would probably be confusing to people looking at the project homepage / changelog. For example recent releases use KataGo (another go-playing engine) to fix early-game mistakes. That is missing in the nodcnn build.

Currently Pachi's build is flexible with features that can be enabled/disabled in the Makefile, similar to ./configure options in projects using autoconf. This way it can adapt to many use cases. There is nothing wrong with distributing different builds as long as they're labeled clearly so people know what they're getting. Sorry about my exagerated initial wording, that felt like the only way to get heard.

For example in debian there are multiple emacs packages: emacs-nox is the terminal-only build with few dependencies, while emacs is the full-featured graphic build that people normally expect. If homebrew supports package variants like this pachi-nodcnn could be a good name for the build homebrew is currently using, together with a description of what's in it / missing compared to a full build.

A reasonable middle ground here may be to add caffe as a resource in the formula so e.g. the pachi formula builds its own caffe and we used that.

If that's allowable this could be great. A full-featured homebrew build would be quite useful, there are no official binaries for Mac at the moment. KataGo should be no problem as homebrew already builds it.

[lemonsqueeze]

@GunniBusch Apologies, you didn't do anything wrong and are not to blame for any of this, also your request was perfectly justified and I wish I could have given it a better welcome. Sorry that you walked into this minefield, this stems from longstanding miscommunication issues that we're trying to clear up here. Please don't take it personally.

[MikeMcQuaid]

Thanks @lemonsqueeze!

A reasonable middle ground here may be to add caffe as a resource in the formula so e.g. the pachi formula builds its own caffe and we used that.

If that's allowable this could be great. A full-featured homebrew build would be quite useful, there are no official binaries for Mac at the moment. KataGo should be no problem as homebrew already builds it.

#278155 has an example for this, can you take a look?

[lemonsqueeze]

#278155 has an example for this, can you take a look?

This looks great, wow. And it revealed bugs on my side I didn't know about.
That's quite an involved formula though, I'm worried this is going to be a nightmare to maintain.
For future releases I'll research some more, see if a better solution can be found that makes it easier for everybody.

[MikeMcQuaid]

That's quite an involved formula though, I'm worried this is going to be a nightmare to maintain.
For future releases I'll research some more, see if a better solution can be found that makes it easier for everybody.

@lemonsqueeze if you're working to make it easier to maintain: that's more than we normally get from projects so would be great news.

[lemonsqueeze]

If you're working to make it easier to maintain: that's more than we normally get from projects so would be great news.

Oh I'll benefit as well, I have to build this thing also and caffe static builds are pretty insane !