Generating a list of 'pinned' dependencies

[jgostick]

It occurred to me that if some future person were to do pip install porespy==1.6.1 in 10 years, pip will actually install the latest version of all our dependecies since we don't pin them. For instance, I am addding an appendix to a journal paper with recipes for generating/reproducing images, but in 10 years if a reader actually tries to install porespy==2.0.1, it probably won't work. I do not want to pin them becuase that creates a dependency hell for users, requiring a new virtual env for every package. But we need a way to install a working version of our past code.

I'm thinking we should include in the repo an output of all the exact versions of the dependencies that were used to run the tests prior to the release. That way someone can at least update the setup.py file with the version numbers, and then install from source (pip install -e .). There must be a simple way to generate such a file each time we craft a new release?

A nice alternative would be for pip to support a date argument, so that people could do pip install porespy@2022.01.05 and it would find all the versions of packages as of that date. That'd be super handy. It's so obviously handy that it might already exist?

[jgostick]

I just looked at the pip docs. They recommend creating a wheel which has all the deps in it