New python-mip release

[AdeelK93]

Hi! With python 3.12 and highs support - do you think we can release a new version of python-mip to pypi? Thank you!

[h-g-s]

Sorry for the delay. Working on a new release in the next few weeks.

[tkralphs]

Looks like there's been a new release! https://github.com/coin-or/python-mip/releases/tag/v1.17.1

[tkralphs]

Hi @h-g-s, the new release looks great! I noticed you moved the Cbc binaries out of the project, which is definitely a good move. They are now in a binary-only wheel here, but I am wondering if it would be a better solution to just use conda/mamba to install cbc binaries? Obviously, the drawback of that is there is no release yet from the master branch, but I assume we are going to fix that soonish?

My concern is that that this is now another project that needs long-term maintenance and its releases also don't seem to be tied to the releases of Cbc, making bug reporting difficult. It would be good to have some discussion about these issues to make sure we have a good long-term strategy.

[rschwarz]

I don't have the burden of maintenance, but personally, I like the idea of cbcbox (also the related highsbox) because the solvers are now only a simple pip install away. They can also be marked as dependencies for other Python packages, which helps with development.

[tkralphs]

Yes, I get the value proposition, but I'm also very sensitive to how these things tend to go in the long-term. Unless someone who is motivated and knows they will have bandwidth into the future steps up to do the maintenance, this will become another pain point. It looks like there's a lot of reinvention of wheels going on inside cbcbox. It has its own build system, which also as to be maintained, while coinbrew is doing the same job. CyLP already has a much simpler recipe for building Cbc and including binaries in Python wheels. I just want to avoid having yet another complicated build harness that needs to be maintained.

I guess we can see how things go. If we manage to keep maintaining and making releases of python-mip, then someone will hopefully be willing to also look at cbcbox.

[h-g-s]

Hi @h-g-s, the new release looks great! I noticed you moved the Cbc binaries out of the project, which is definitely a good move. They are now in a binary-only wheel here, but I am wondering if it would be a better solution to just use conda/mamba to install cbc binaries? Obviously, the drawback of that is there is no release yet from the master branch, but I assume we are going to fix that soonish?

My concern is that that this is now another project that needs long-term maintenance and its releases also don't seem to be tied to the releases of Cbc, making bug reporting difficult. It would be good to have some discussion about these issues to make sure we have a good long-term strategy.

Hi Ted,

Yes, we'll have cbc 3.0 soon, doing lots of tests - will be rock solid :)

cbcbox allowed me to experiment quickly with build options - and I was positively surprised with the strong results that AVX2 optimization provided, so I included both builds (avx2 optimized and generic) for x86 64. It would be more convenient in the future if some existing project (i.e. cbc tself) could provide builds with similar features/performance so that we don't bifurcate efforts. As for conda or other alternatives, I'm not knowledgeable of the advantages of these over the approach I took (idea from highsbox) which is distribute wheels from pypi. Would like to learn more.