Package request: raft, libraft, pylibraft

[h-vetinari]

Package name

raft

Package version

Newest

Package website

https://github.com/rapidsai/raft

Package availability

Github

Additional comments

Saw this is used in faiss and (after looking) a couple more rapids-related places. It did get mentioned in #14546 & #21901, where the former noted:

Our CMakeLists.txt looks for it, and one of our header-only build dependencies (raft) includes it,

However, based on the upstream readme, there's also some compiled C++ code and python bindings:

Package is not available

• The package is not available on conda-forge.

No previous issues or open PRs

• No previous issue exists and no PR has been opened.

[h-vetinari]

CC @conda-forge/libcugraph @conda-forge/libcublas == @conda-forge/cuda, if you have any inputs here that would be much appreciated.

[leofang]

RAPIDS folks on the cuda team might be able to give advices. I am not familiar with RAFT's build system and packaging approach.

[vyasr]

It looks like the libcugraph feedstock has been archived. Personally I wasn't even aware that we had put this on conda-forge at one point. raft is currently in the process of being split into two libraries raft and cuvs (see the README for some info), and I suspect that after that split is complete FAISS will almost entirely rely on the latter. Meanwhile, raft will become a header-only library, so it may be less important to package since it could also be reliably fetched from source during a build (e.g. via Bazel or CMake). I'm not sure if anything else on conda-forge right now makes use of raft. As a result, I'd probably advocate waiting on taking any action here until the raft split is completed and we can more carefully evaluate exactly what is needed.