This came out of PR #49, related to automate updating changelog from PR names for ACRO-R, a bigger mismatch that failed macos-ci check constantly: the install guide tells the user to set up a Python environment by hand and install acro into it, but the R code in acro_init() also tries to do this automatically, the two paths do not check each other, so if a user already has acro available somewhere the code does not notice and still tries to install it from scratch, on a TRE that cannot reach PyPI this fresh install fails and the user is stuck, happy to be corrected if I am missing something
A few ideas worth gut checking me on,
This came out of PR #49, related to automate updating changelog from PR names for ACRO-R, a bigger mismatch that failed macos-ci check constantly: the install guide tells the user to set up a Python environment by hand and install acro into it, but the R code in acro_init() also tries to do this automatically, the two paths do not check each other, so if a user already has acro available somewhere the code does not notice and still tries to install it from scratch, on a TRE that cannot reach PyPI this fresh install fails and the user is stuck, happy to be corrected if I am missing something
A few ideas worth gut checking me on,
before building a new environment, could install_venv first check whether acro is already importable from a few likely Python interpreters, if any of them already has acro then use that one and skip the install, this would let users who already have acro installed by an admin avoid the broken install path
could the install guide be split into two clear routes, one for desktop users who can let acro_init() handle everything, and one for TRE users where an admin has to install acro ahead of time, right now the guide mixes both paths and that is confusing
could the conda install option from feat: add support for conda environments #35 and the admin workaround from [Documentation] Add more help for reticulation setup problems #20 be written up as named recipes in the install guide, that would also close out [Feature] Gather more feedback to document support for conda-forge environments #29 which has been open since November