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Comment by pxc

3 days ago

It seems Unsloth is useful and popular, and you seem responsive and helpful. I'd be down to try to improve this and maybe package Unsloth for Nix as well, if you're up for reviewing and answering questions; seems fun.

Imo it's best to just depend on the required fork of llama.cpp at build time (or not) according to some configuration. Installing things at runtime is nuts (especially if it means modifying the existing install path). But if you don't want to do that, I think this would also be an improvement:

  - see if llama.cpp is on the PATH and already has the requisite features
  - if not, check /etc/os-release to determine distro
  - if unavailable, guess distro class based on the presence of high-level package managers (apt, dnf, yum, zypper, pacman) on the PATH
  - bail, explain the problem to the user, give copy/paste-friendly instructions at the end of we managed to figure out where we're running

Is either sort of change potentially agreeable enough that you'd be happy to review it?

22 comments

pxc

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danielhanchen  2 days ago

As an update, I pushed https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth-zoo/commit/ae675a0a2d20...

(1) Removed and disabled sudo

(2) Installing via apt-get will ask user's input() for permission

(3) Added an error if failed llama.cpp and provides instructions to manual compile llama.cpp

  • mFixman  2 days ago

    Maybe it's a personal preference, but I don't want external programs to ever touch my package manager, even with permission. Besides, this will fail loudly for systems that don't use `apt-get`.

    I would just ask the user to install the package, and _maybe_ show the command line to install it (but never run it).

    • lucideer  2 days ago

      I don't think this should be a personal preference, I think it should be a standard*.

      That said, it does at least seem like these recent changes are a large step in the right direction.

      ---

      * in terms of what the standard approach should be, we live in an imperfect world and package management has been done "wrong" in many ecosystems, but in an ideal world I think the "correct" solution here should be:

      (1) If it's an end user tool it should be a self contained binary or it should be a system package installed via the package manager (which will manage any ancillary dependencies for you)

      (2) If it's a dev tool (which, if you're cloning a cpp repo & building binaries, it is), it should not touch anything systemwide. Whatsoever.

      This often results in a README with manual instructions to install deps, but there are many good automated ways to approach this. E.g. for CPP this is a solved problem with Conan Profiles. However that might incur significant maintenace overhead for the Unsloth guys if it's not something the ggml guys support. A dockerised build is another potential option here, though that would still require the user to have some kind of container engine installed, so still not 100% ideal.

      3 replies →

    • danielhanchen  2 days ago

      Hopefully the solution for now is a compromise if that works? It will show the command as well, so if not accepted, typing no will error out and tell the user on how to install the package

danielhanchen  2 days ago

Thanks for the suggestions! Apologies again I'm pretty bad at packaging, so hence the current setup.

1. So I added a `check_llama_cpp` which checks if llama.cpp does exist and it'll use the prebuilt one https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth-zoo/blob/main/unsloth_z...

2. Yes I like the idea of determining distro

3. Agreed on bailing - I was also thinking if doing a Python input() with a 30 second waiting period for apt-get if that's ok? We tell the user we will apt-get some packages (only if apt exists) (no sudo), and after 30 seconds, it'll just error out

4. I will remove sudo immediately (ie now), and temporarily just do (3)

But more than happy to fix this asap - again sorry on me being dumb

  • mkl  2 days ago

    It shouldn't install any packages itself. Just print out a message about the missing packages and your guess of the command to install them, then exit. That way users can run the command themselves if it's appropriate or add the packages to their container build or whatever. People set up machines in a lot of different ways, and automatically installing things is going to mess that up.