Python Workbench features

[dometto]

This is an issue to discuss what we want to have in our default Python Workbench catalog items.

Flavours

We should have different catalog items for the following flavours:

• Graphical
• Graphical + CUDA
• Do we want a CLI-only flavour (and then also a CLI+CUDA flavour?)

CUDA

• Should be a separate Catalog Item that can only be deployed on VMs with a GPU.
• Ideally the CUDA version would be an interactive parameter that the user can override when deploying a workspace.

miniconda?

In addition to python, pip, and poetry, should we also install miniconda? The miniconda component now supports turning off miniconda_auto_init, in which case the conda environemt is not automatically loaded when the user starts a shell (they need to type conda init themselves when they want to user conda). So we could have one Python Workbench for all users, regardless of whether they prefer to use conda, poetry, etc.

Custom packages

See here.

icommands

Should we install icommands by default? Are there other miscellaneous things that should be installed on the workspaces? If so, and if we want these to be available on all UU catalog items, we could make a "UU Utilities" component that includes the relevant roles (icommands etc.).

[dometto]

@chStaiger @jelletreep if you have a moment could you let me know what you think about the above? We can also discuss this in person or on Teams, but I felt it was useful to have an issue to track this.

[chStaiger]

The icommands and also the python-irodsclient library are already present in the current ubuntu workspaces and jupyter notebook workspaces. So I would keep that in new python workbench.