APIs required by Tensorboard ext (as well as Jupyter ext)

[DonJayamanne]

There are a few requirements in Tensorboard (& Jupyter ext), and I will not create separate issues for each of the APIs as the solution/API exposed could end up being different.

Requirements

• Ability to install packages
• Ability to detect whether packages are installed
• Ability to get version of packages
• Ability to run Python code (spawning kernels, etc)

Proposed solutions

• Provide an API to manage packages
• Provide an API to return
  • Activated env vars of Python env
  • Paths to the tools such as conda, poetry, etc
• Short term
  • Leave existing tensorboard package installation code in Python extension
  • Expose some command or the like that can be used by Tensorboard (to detect/install tensorboard package)
  • This temporary solution can be in place until we get an API sorted out,

Note:

• Detecting whether a package is installed and getting their versions can be done with just a single api getActivatedEnvVars
• Installation of packages is what is complex

Related issues

• Provide and API that returns the activate environment variables merged with variables from .env files #20663
• Provide an API to install Python into an empty Conda environment #20495
• Add an API to expose the tools such as Conda , PyEnv, etc #21732
• Support installing pip if not found when installing Jupyter packages vscode-jupyter#14569

@karrtikr @karthiknadig /cc

[karthiknadig]

The sort term solution looks fine.

Activated env vars of Python env

Is the current getEnvironmentVariables public API not enough here?

[DonJayamanne]

Is the current getEnvironmentVariables public API not enough here?

Nope, that only returns env varialbes from the .env file, not from the active Python environment.
I need one that returns variables from an activated python environment.

[karthiknadig]

@karrtikr I thought you updated this to include the .venv env variables also?

[karrtikr]

Nope, we do not know for sure how activation will look until experiment is finalized, hence we haven't exposed the APIs yet.

[DonJayamanne]

I too thought it was done, and I feel the method getEnvironmentVariables doesn't belong under environments or should be renamed (too late for either one).
I think @karthiknadig too made the same mistake

Unless of course one reads the comments

[DonJayamanne]

ok until experiment is finalized, hence we haven't exposed the APIs yet.

Please can you point me to that code,
Interested in that, thanks

[karrtikr]

I think I mentioned before in slack that exposing such an API is blocked on #20950 where we're actively working with VS Code to finalize how activation will look like, which determines the shape of the API.

If we find out using activated environment variables is sufficient, we can expose getActivatedEnvironmentVariables API, which will be asynchronous as opposed to getEnvironmentVariables API.

[karthiknadig]

I think having two APIs for getting environment variables can get confusing. We can discuss this offline.