[conda] Unable to make a conda build

[fg-mindee]

Unfortunately, one of the project dependencies does not have any conda release or any way to make one. I opened an issue on their repo pymupdf/PyMuPDF#938 to track this, but so far I haven't found any way to release the project on anaconda with this dependency.

[charlesmindee]

Is it mandatory to support conda? If so, maybe we can switch to another pdf-reader lib.

[fg-mindee]

Not mandatory but this is a very common installation mean for python package. We might investigate other options to replace the dependency but we'll have to check for performance drop first

[fg-mindee]

For reference, my initial issue on PyMuPDF (pymupdf/PyMuPDF#938) was moved to this discussion: pymupdf/PyMuPDF#1137

[kchawla-pi]

Why not simply do a

conda run pip install <missing in conda package>

Especially since there's is only one package

[fg-mindee]

Hi @kchawla-pi,

So actually since then, there is also weasyprint that is missing a conda build. But it happens that I was thinking about getting back to the bottom of this yesterday. Worst case scenario, we'll make some features optional (such as HTML compatibility through weasyprint) so that the core build is available in conda.

Also please note that for now, the only important dependencies that would benefit from a conda support (performance-wise) are PyTorch & TensorFlow 👍

Anyway, we'll provide some updates on this very topic soon!

[charlesmindee]

So now with #829 we are just missing weasyprint, right @fg-mindee ?

[fg-mindee]

So now with #829 we are just missing weasyprint, right @fg-mindee ?

Nope, pypdfium2 also lacks support of a conda installation. But that could be fixed, I'll ping them about this!
However, having doctr.io.pdf and doctr.io.html as extras, would do the trick 👍

And I think we should seriously consider that: especially for HTML, it's more about people in need of training data, so I would argue that most users don't benefit from weasyprint (which is a problem for MAC users also #815)

For PDFs, it's more important, so if we can get a conda build, our best course of action would probably be to move html/weasyprint to an extra! What do you think?

[fg-mindee]

I just checked and weasyprint does have a conda build now 🙌
https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/weasyprint

(But I still think we should move it to extra builds)