Known issues on Ubuntu 20.04

[lanctot]

Hi all,

We recently discovered OpenSpiel has installation problems on Ubuntu 20.04; there is a failure when trying to install tensorflow from pip.

A quick investigation reveals that TF (both version 1.15 that we use now and version 2) requires a Python version <= 3.7 but Ubuntu 20.04 comes with Python 3.8.

We don't currently have a solution, but will be looking into it. Any tips or advice on how to fix this are welcome!

[lanctot]

Update after some searching: looks like the TF nightly builds have python3.8 support as of a few days ago: tensorflow/tensorflow#33374

So I don't expect this to be a problem for much longer, but we will have to update all of our code to support TF 2. Last I tried, about 10 of the tests were failing when we tried adding that requirement, but I guess they should not be too hard to fix.

[lanctot]

Good news, looks like TF 2.2 now available via pip:

lanctot@:~$ pip3 install --upgrade tensorflow
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting tensorflow
  Downloading tensorflow-2.2.0rc1-cp38-cp38-manylinux2010_x86_64.whl (516.2 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 516.2 MB 5.5 kB/s 
                .
                .
                .
lanctot@:~$ python3
Python 3.8.2 (default, Mar 13 2020, 10:14:16) 
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tensorflow as tf
>>> print(tf.__version__)
2.2.0-rc1
>>> 

[lanctot]

Quick update: we've managed to get it down to 5 tests failing, and it's all uses of Sonnet that won't work with disable_v2_behavior. We tried to upgrade these uses to TF2 + Sonnet2 but it's non-trivial and will take time (too much time that we don't currently have). Since our uses of Sonnet are very simple, we plan to just remove them. This will hopefully also fix the colab issues here: #191

Edit: we will also tag a release before we do this so that people can easily checkout the pre-TF upgrade version, hopefully causing less disruption or backward-compatibility issues.

[lanctot]

Toward the end of June I plan to address these issues and finally release again once we've gotten the code to be stable under TF2.2 + Python3.8 and Travis-CI adds official support for Ubuntu 20.04.

This could lead to some breaking changes, so we have now released OpenSpiel 0.1.0: https://github.com/deepmind/open_spiel/releases which hopefully can help minimize any disruption.

[lanctot]

Update: I have OpenSpiel compiling and passing all tests in Ubuntu 20.04 with TF 2.2. Details here: #249 .

If Travis-CI tests pass in Ubuntu 18.04, we might import this before Travis supports 20.04. I will discuss it with the team.

[lanctot]

This is now fixed! Commit details are here: b65db20

Apologies if this causes any problems and we'll do our best to help fix them.