set compat to julia >= 1.9

[jeremiedb]

No description provided.

[jeremiedb]

@pat-alt Adding tests on Julia <1.9 revealed that there appear to be issues associated with the Optimisers' explicit parametrization approach. Learning seems essentially to fail when running on Julia <v1.9.
I couldn't find back the discussions around it in Flux while making the transition to Optimisers.jl, only this: FluxML/Flux.jl#1986.

As a initial measure, I'd go with the lower bound to Julia v1.9. If there's a clean way to add back compatibility to Julia v1.6 I'd for sure consider it, but hopefully most potential users are operating on Julia 1.9+.

[pat-alt]

@jeremiedb thanks for flagging. I guess this may explain why the current dev version of Flux is also bound to 1.9? Not entirely sure though.

I'll add a note about this to the docs for the NeuroTreeExt in CounterfactualExplanations.jl. And thanks for merging the other PR from yesterday.

[pat-alt]

Oh I'm now seeing you've changed that compat entry back here, no worries. I'll run tests for the extension on 1.9+ and add a note. Thanks!

Edit: Actually, I still need NeuroTreeModels in the test environment to test the extension on versions 1.9+. I think that for now this means I just won't be able to include tests for it all, unless I remove backward compatibility from CounterfactualExplanations.jl.

[jeremiedb]

Edit: Actually, I still need NeuroTreeModels in the test environment to test the extension on versions 1.9+. I think that for now this means I just won't be able to include tests for it all, unless I remove backward compatibility from CounterfactualExplanations.jl.

For clarification, is the concern that you want to maintain the compatibility of CounterfactualExplanations.jl with Julia 1.6 and not increase it's lower bound to 1.9?

Wold it be possible to have the NeuroTreeModelsExt only available if Julia >= 1.9, for example by not loading the extension if conditional on julia version? Actually, since the extension capability is introduced with Julia 1.9, I think that just commenting out the inclusion of the extension could do it:

if !isdefined(Base, :get_extension)
    # include("../ext/EvoTreesCUDAExt/EvoTreesCUDAExt.jl") # commenting out the inclusion of the extention because of compat with julia 1.9+
end

[pat-alt]

For clarification, is the concern that you want to maintain the compatibility of CounterfactualExplanations.jl with Julia 1.6 and not increase it's lower bound to 1.9?

Yes, exactly.

Wold it be possible to have the NeuroTreeModelsExt only available if Julia >= 1.9, for example by not loading the extension if conditional on julia version?

That's basically what I've done in the end. I've just added a separate local environment in the test folder for NeuroTreeModels and activate that only on >= 1.9: https://github.com/JuliaTrustworthyAI/CounterfactualExplanations.jl/tree/main/test/models/neurotree

So ultimately, no issues anymore on my end.

Thanks!