pixi environment doesn't work on osx-64

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

What is your issue?

I've had great luck with pixi on other project, so when I saw the pixi.toml file here, I was quite happy.

Alas -- pixi shell barfed out on me right away:

$ pixi shell
Error: unsupported-platform

  × The workspace does not support 'osx-64'.
  │ Add it with 'pixi workspace platform add osx-64'.
  help: supported platforms are win-64, linux-64, osx-arm64

Any reason not to add it? I know, it's old, but a lot of us still have those machines ...

But also:

When I first tried this, it gave me that message, but then still tried to build the enviroment for osx-arm -- which then failed. After updating pixi, I now get the simple message.

But the failure was confusing -- it should be able to do that.

And then I wondered why it was even trying to rebuild -- and then noticed that there is no pixi.lock file in the repo.

Looking back at #10732 -- it seemed folks were moving toward saving the lock file -- and I think that's a much better way to go -- one of the key features of pixi.

Anyway -- what is the intent here?

Is the intent to use pixi for development in general, or is it really just for the CI?

Should I try to add osx-Intel?

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

OK -- very simple to add osx-64 and try it -- so I did. It seemed to work fine.

I've done a PR: #11137

[VeckoTheGecko]

Yeah, leaving out 64 was an oversight on my part oops - didnt know ppl were still using that :).

Re commiting the lockfile, it has pros and cons. The real blocker for us is that Pixi doesnt have support for dynamic versioning of python packages. There are other considerations as well, which Ive wrapped into a pr here prefix-dev/pixi#5404

[VeckoTheGecko]

(ps, feel free to cc me on Pixi xarray stuff :)) I like those pings)

[keewis]

the problem really is where to draw the line: adding osx-64 to the project is not really a problem on its own (it just takes a bit longer to resolve the environments), but there is a long list of supported platforms with a varying degree of popularity and we can't add all of them:

Error:   × 'test' is not a known platform. Valid platforms are 'noarch', 'unknown', 'linux-32', 'linux-64', 'linux-aarch64', 'linux-armv6l', 'linux-armv7l', 'linux-loong64', 'linux-ppc64le', 'linux-ppc64', 'linux-ppc', 'linux-s390x', 'linux-
  │ riscv32', 'linux-riscv64', 'freebsd-64', 'osx-64', 'osx-arm64', 'win-32', 'win-64', 'win-arm64', 'emscripten-wasm32', 'wasi-wasm32', 'zos-z'

Is the intent to use pixi for development in general, or is it really just for the CI?

development in general. I would love to be able to extend the project config using features defined in a user-global config file, but as far as I can tell that's not supported, yet (and I don't know any workarounds that could be used).

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

but there is a prefix-dev/pixi#1742 with a varying degree of popularity.

well you certainly don't have to add any until someone asks for it :-)

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

It looks like my PR is on the way -- closing, so I don't forget to close :-)