I was very excited when Julia 1.0 came out. Since then I was waiting for JuliaPro 1.x as I love the curated packages that just work out of box. When it finally arrived, yesterday I installed JuliaPro 1.0.1.1 on Windows 10 64-bit, and glanced through the document on the new package manager.
To my surprise, the curated packages that used to come with JuliaPro (e.g. 0.6.x) could not be found. For example, “using StatsBase” will give the following error message:
ERROR: ArgumentError: Package StatsBase not found in current path:
- Run
import Pkg; Pkg.add("StatsBase")to install the StatsBase package.
So here’s my question: is it true that these curated packages do not come with JuliaPro 1.x by default now? Or did I miss something, especially regarding the new package manager?
The following experience may help people who got confused by the authentication for package installation like me:
I was able to add StatsBase using the package manager REPL command “add”; you can also achieve that by importing Pkg then do the old-style “Pkg.add”. However, a surprise was that first time I added a package, a message asked me to authenticate:
[ Info: Please Authenticate…
I did this on a command console, and nothing happened after this for a long time, until a time-out message showed up telling me that I can download a token file by logging into pkg.juliacomputing.com using GitHub, Google, or LinkedIn account. I did that and manually copied and pasted the downloaded token.toml file to C:\Users\my_user_name.julia. Successive package installations went on smoothly.
Only later did I find out from the JuliaProQuickStartGuide that I was actually supposed to start first package operations in Juno’s Julia REPL. By doing that an HTML pane will open with the authentication page. After logging in, the token file will be downloaded and stored automatically.
I found this process very confusing. Not all Julia users use Juno as IDE. For someone who starts to play with JuliaPro 1.x from a command console or non-Juno IDE, he/she could get stuck. Not sure if this is related to system rights or something, but JuliaPro seems unable to open a web browser to display a webpage on Windows. If that’s true, I think it’ll be very helpful to display a message about the alternative authentication method quickly before the time-out, because I bet many people will think Julia just hang and won’t wait for so long (actually the first time I tried this I just closed the window by force and went back to JuliaPro 0.6.4).
Apart from these surprises, I’m looking forward to becoming productive in Julia 1.x asap since Julia is a great language and 1.x is supposed to be stable now. Three cheers to the team that made it happen!