Add conda developer environment for Mac ARM

[Ch0ronomato]

Description

My work machine is an M2 mac with the apple silicon. Not sure if this is a machine y'all are planning on supporting, but these were the changes I needed to make to environment.yaml to get off the ground.

Related Issue

• Closes #
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Checklist

• Checked that the pre-commit linting/style checks pass
• Included tests that prove the fix is effective or that the new feature works
• Added necessary documentation (docstrings and/or example notebooks)
• If you are a pro: each commit corresponds to a relevant logical change

Type of change

• New feature / enhancement
• Bug fix
• Documentation
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[maresb]

Ah, hmm, indeed this is pretty awkward. The proposed changes will break things for those not on Apple Silicon.

Ideally we should be doing something like depend on libblas and allow conda's pinning mechanism to install the right thing. I've messed around with it before, but never managed to get good results. I should probably poke at it some more.

[Ch0ronomato]

I couldn't get anything either to be totally honest. It doesn't seem like it's a lost battle, but it gets me deving on an m1 for now - though I fully intend for it to be a bit of wasted pr. I did see there was some conda like # [not osx] type hints that might be relevant; though adding a gen_environment.py that does this resolution for us might be an okay fix

[twiecki]

This would bake in accelerate instead of MKL, which we probably also don't want.

We figured out how to do this in the conda-forge package. https://github.com/conda-forge/pytensor-suite-feedstock/blob/main/recipe/meta.yaml Not sure it works here?

Alternatively we could add a different environment.yml for ARM64.

[Ch0ronomato]

@twiecki yea, an alternative env file makes sense as well

[maresb]

Multiple env files are indeed a straightforward and simple workaround.

Those # [python_expression] things are called preprocessing selectors and unfortunately only apply to the meta.yaml Conda recipe specification, not the environment.yaml spec.

[Ch0ronomato]

Sounds great, I'll go ahead and edit this to be environment_arm.yml

[maresb]

I'd recommend calling it environment-osx-arm64.yaml. (In addition to the osx-arm64 platform there's also linux-aarch64 where arm64 and aarch64 are synonymous, and linux-aarch64 can be used for Docker containers on Apple Silicon.)

[maresb]

This approach looks good for now. I think pixi would be able to handle this much more elegantly via features and multienvironments:

https://pixi.sh/latest/features/multi_environment/

But transitioning to pixi is a bit more involved, so let's get this merged for now.

[Ch0ronomato]

Can we get this merged?

[maresb]

Thanks @Ch0ronomato! LGTM