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New Julia user tutorial should start with creating an empty environment

Open isaacsas opened this issue 1 year ago • 4 comments

For new users, it is easy to add lots of packages in the default scope and end up with out of date packages holding things back, see

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unable-to-reproduce-catalyst-jl-example/106099/15

We should consider starting the tutorial for new users, and maybe even the tutorial for advanced users, with a short section that suggests creating a new environment and adding the relevant packages for the tutorial only (explaining why this is considered good practice). Then we can give the commands via Pkg. to install the needed tutorial libraries.

isaacsas avatar Nov 12 '23 20:11 isaacsas

I wonder if we should do this at the SciML level. We basically just copy-paste the same installation instructions into the same repo. Maybe they should be a bit more precise, like we should say "make and environment and add ..., for more information see ..." and maybe point to https://docs.sciml.ai/Overview/stable/getting_started/installation/ with an extended discussion on package environments?

ChrisRackauckas avatar Nov 12 '23 20:11 ChrisRackauckas

This makes sense, agreed. Will add it to the list.

TorkelE avatar Nov 12 '23 21:11 TorkelE

I think it makes sense to have at the SciML level too (we can always say it is not required but recommended for the following reasons…).

isaacsas avatar Nov 12 '23 21:11 isaacsas

Having a more extensive SciML intro (something like https://docs.sciml.ai/Overview/stable/getting_started/installation/) would be useful, and we could link there (although we already link to a couple of general Julia stuff). Then we could have a section in the Catalyst intro tutorial describing the issue and how to do, and link to SciML for more general details.

TorkelE avatar Nov 12 '23 21:11 TorkelE

now works on master

TorkelE avatar Jun 04 '24 19:06 TorkelE