Encountering errors following start of Development process in scikit-image/CONTRIBUTING.rst

Hello. I’m following the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.rst but running into problems. I’ve tried both code paths (venv and conda) and hit an error different places:

For venv:

python3 -m venv skimage-dev
source skimage-dev/bin/activate.fish
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements/build.txt
./dev.py build
skimage/meson.build:41:0: ERROR: Tried to form an absolute path to a dir in the source tree.
You should not do that but use relative paths instead, for
directories that are part of your project.

To get include path to any directory relative to the current dir do

incdir = include_directories(dirname)

After this incdir will contain both the current source dir as well as the
corresponding build dir. It can then be used in any subdirectory and
Meson will take care of all the busywork to make paths work.

Dirname can even be '.' to mark the current directory. Though you should
remember that the current source and build directories are always
put in the include directories by default so you only need to do
include_directories('.') if you intend to use the result in a
different subdirectory.

Note that this error message can also be triggered by
external dependencies being installed within your source
tree - it's not recommended to do this.

For conda:

conda create --name skimage-dev
conda activate skimage-dev
conda install -c conda-forge --file requirements.txt
conda install -c conda-forge --file requirements.txt

CondaValueError: could not parse '-r requirements/default.txt' in: requirements.txt

Hi @nathan-chan-brt,

Apparently this error occurs when creating a venv inside of the source tree. Can you try making your venv outside?

If this is indeed the issue, we’ll have to update CONTRIBUTING.txt accordingly.

Yes! Creating the venv outside the source tree (i just did it in the directory immediately above) resolved this.

Excellent! Would you like to make a pull request to update CONTRIBUTE.txt? That’d be very helpful!