Reverting back to avoid precompile errors?

New to Julia
21

To be clear, the problem here is as follows:

  1. Julia is started and some packages are imported as part of an editing environment (e.g. IJulia, Atom etc.) or from the startup file. These imports happen in some (Julia) environment (possibly the default) with its set of package versions for direct and indirect dependencies.
  2. A different environment is activated. This might have different package versions in its manifest than the first environment had because the compat requirements makes it necessary to resolve to a different set of versions.
  3. Some package is imported in the new environment. In case this package or one of its dependencies was already loaded in step 1, that will be reused since Julia can only have one version of a given package loaded in the same process. However, if that was of a different version than we wanted to load this time, we wonā€™t have the code we intended and if there were breaking changes between the versions things might, well, break.

Actually Revise has very few non-stdlib indirect dependencies but if Requires or OrderedCollections ever get breaking updates, things might get ugly.

2 Likes
22

Thereā€™s the problem then:

(@v1.7) pkg> activate --temp                
  Activating new project at `/tmp/jl_R7mGad`

(jl_R7mGad) pkg> add JuliaFormatter                                   
    Updating registry at `~/.julia/registries/General`                
    Updating git-repo `https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General.git`
   Resolving package versions...                                      
    Updating `/tmp/jl_R7mGad/Project.toml`                            
  [98e50ef6] + JuliaFormatter v0.15.10                                
    Updating `/tmp/jl_R7mGad/Manifest.toml`                           
...

julia> using JuliaFormatter                                                                       
[ Info: Precompiling JuliaFormatter [98e50ef6-434e-11e9-1051-2b60c6c9e899]                        
                                                                                                  
(jl_R7mGad) pkg> add CSV                                                                          
   Resolving package versions...                                                                  
    Updating `/tmp/jl_R7mGad/Project.toml`                                                        
  [336ed68f] + CSV v0.8.5                                                                         
    Updating `/tmp/jl_R7mGad/Manifest.toml`                                                       
  [336ed68f] + CSV v0.8.5                                                                         
  [9a962f9c] + DataAPI v1.7.0                                                                     
  [e2d170a0] + DataValueInterfaces v1.0.0                                                         
  [82899510] + IteratorInterfaceExtensions v1.0.0                                                 
  [69de0a69] ā†“ Parsers v2.0.3 ā‡’ v1.1.2    # note `Parsers` being downgraded a major version!
  [2dfb63ee] + PooledArrays v1.3.0                                                                
  [91c51154] + SentinelArrays v1.3.7                                                              
  [3783bdb8] + TableTraits v1.0.1                                                                 
  [bd369af6] + Tables v1.5.0                                                                      
  [9fa8497b] + Future                                                                             
Precompiling project...                                                                           
  1 dependency successfully precompiled in 8 seconds (24 already precompiled)                     
                                                                                                  
(jl_R7mGad) pkg> st                                                                               
      Status `/tmp/jl_R7mGad/Project.toml`                                                        
  [336ed68f] CSV v0.8.5                                                                           
  [98e50ef6] JuliaFormatter v0.15.10                                                              
                                                                                                  
julia> using CSV                                                                                  
[ Info: Precompiling CSV [336ed68f-0bac-5ca0-87d4-7b16caf5d00b]                                   
ERROR: LoadError: TypeError: in Type{...} expression, expected UnionAll, got Type{Parsers.Options}

The using JuliaFormatter step at the start is crucial. Since JuliaFormatter depends on CommonMark, which depends on JSON which claims to be and truly is compatible with Parsers versions 1 and 2, Iā€™m not sure where to lay blame here. Truthfully, JuliaFormatters and Parsers should have to be recompiled once Parsers was downgraded or CSV should see a different Parsers to JuliaFormatter (which is stated non-policy, as far as I remember).

Is there documentation/precedent for how this is handled?

23

Thereā€™s a related issue at least: Warn when a package loads a dependencies that already got loaded and that dependency has a different version than in the current manifest. Ā· Issue #32906 Ā· JuliaLang/julia Ā· GitHub

3 Likes
24

Nice, Iā€™ll crosslink this thread to github so we have an example ā€œout in the wildā€ - thanks for finding that issue!

1 Like
25

Dear All, I canā€™t understand any of thisā€¦ I just canā€™t load CSV. I donā€™t need/want to know why it is failing, but I will not be able to use Julia until this is fixed and I can run

]add CSV
using CSV

Does anyone have any idea when that might be?

Thanks

26

Impossible to say without knowing more details but you can try it from the Julia REPL after starting Julia with julia --startup-file=no.

1 Like
27

The solution suggested by @GunnarFarneback is more general, however a very Atom-specific work-around is to add CSV to the base environment and then restarting Atom. The dependencies of CSV are then incorporated early enough in the initiation process not to cause problems. After that it works fine to activate other environments and adding CSV to them as needed.

1 Like