update-vpr-yosys-yosys-plugins

[kkumar23]

update to latest version

[kkumar23]

@mkurc-ant : Can we always use latest version of vtr/yosys/yosys-plugins instead of specifying the versions?

[mkurc-ant]

@kkumar23 You can do that by removing the version string from conda package specification strings. However I advice against it as sometimes update to a newer version may break things (as it probably happened now - the CI is red). That's why in my opinion it is better to keep all the versions fixed and update them manually only when needed.

[kkumar23]

@mkurc-ant : Right, the reason i asked is when there are any commit in vpr/yosys-plugins we need to make sure the environment.yml needs manual update. Sometimes we may miss that, which happened recently so.
Again the question would be how often should we update the package in yml file. And is it by trail and error that we need to pick the right version ?

[mkurc-ant]

@kkumar23 The environment.yml should contain fixed package version with which the code in the repository will work. This is also being checked by CI. There is also the second file under quicklogic/common/toolchain_wrappers that holds versions to be used by the toolchain. Those versions should be the same.

I don't think that we have missed any update to environment.yml in this repository as the CI on the master branch is green.

I can see two situations where we need to change package versions:

• 1. A new feature / bugfix has been added to a package and it is required to run the code,
• 2. We want to keep package versions in sync with another fork (eg. upstream),

The first one is obvious however for the second it is usually that the packages at upstream are older than those in this fork so that we take care to update them and make sure that everything works when upstreaming.

I wouldn't call updating versions trial and error. Usually we use the most recent revisions (unless there is something preventing from that eg. a breaking change) and plan for additional effort required to test and update the rest of the code to match.

[kkumar23]

I agree that right solution to this would be to use the upstream. But since we are using Quicklogic fork for all activities, I think we need to make sure packages should be updated in case if there are any PR to VPR or Yosys/plugins.

[mkurc-ant]

@kkumar23 Yes, If you want the QuickLogic for to always use the newest tool versions then this is ok.

But then you will eventually want to integrate the fork with upstream SymbiFlow where different versions may be used and the solution would be to update the versions in upstream as well. This may break other architectures of different vendors.

Anyways, the CI is red because the versions you updated in environment.yaml are not compatible with the rest of the code/scripts. Do you want us to work on fixing the CI issue so that those versions can be used in the QuickLogic fork?

[kkumar23]

@tpagarani can comment on the support to fix CI for latest vtr/yosys package support.