Config system as a separate package

[jklaise]

I feel like the config system together with the function registry is a killer feature of Thinc, so much so that I can see it as a standalone solution to solve all kinds of configuration problems in Python. Would there be any interest in making it installable as a standalone package? I understand this may be a cheeky question as there are some costs associated with decoupling and maintaining yet another package, but I wanted to ask anyway!

[bdewilde]

FWIW: A few months back I used catalogue along with a home-brewed config system inspired by thinc's to define multi-component ML pipelines -- and put them to use in production. There's definitely a use case! Especially for folks who don't need or aren't ready to commit to a full-featured framework like, say, MLflow.

[hbredin]

I'd also use (and beta test) such a separate config/registry package!

In the meantime, I might still consider adding thinc as a dependency to my current project just for thinc.Config and thinc.registry.

[svlandeg]

Yes, I think the plan is to move this functionality to catalogue indeed :-)

[NixBiks]

Is there an overview of the necessary steps? I'd like to help if possible

[svlandeg]

As an update, this is now work in progress. We've already started moving things to catalogue: explosion/catalogue#33

The remaining steps will be mainly technical (coordinating releases & versioning) but we hope to finalize this soonish.

[bdewilde]

Very exciting! Thanks a ton for the update, @svlandeg . Looking forward to the next major version of catalogue!

[rmitsch]

The config system is now included in catalogue.

[rmitsch]

Correction: integrating the config system in catalogue causes some issues with other dependencies. For the time being the config functionality will still be included in Thinc, but we are working on moving this to a separate package.

[rmitsch]

The config system is finally available as a standalone package: confection.