Is it expected that vllm depends on outlines?

[nchammas]

Seems like a circular dependency. I can't install the latest version of outlines and vllm because the latter depends on v1 of outlines.

Here's the output from Poetry:

$ poetry add vllm
<works and installs vllm (>=0.7.3,<0.8.0)>
$ poetry add "outlines[vllm]"
Using version ^0.2.1 for outlines

Updating dependencies
Resolving dependencies... (0.1s)

Because no versions of outlines match >0.2.1,<0.3.0
 and outlines[vllm] (0.2.1) depends on outlines (0.2.1), outlines[vllm] (>=0.2.1,<0.3.0) requires outlines (0.2.1).
And because vllm (0.7.3) depends on outlines (0.1.11)
 and no versions of vllm match >0.7.3,<0.8.0, outlines[vllm] (>=0.2.1,<0.3.0) is incompatible with vllm (>=0.7.3,<0.8.0).
So, because myproject depends on both vllm (>=0.7.3,<0.8.0) and outlines[vllm] (^0.2.1), version solving failed.

In other words, vllm 0.7.3 depends on outlines 0.1.11. So I can't install outlines 0.2.1 (or any version of outlines other than 0.1.11).

I can pin outlines to 0.1.11, but this seems strange.

Is it expected that vllm depends on outlines in this way?

[cpfiffer]

Yeah, it's expected. vllm uses Outlines for structured generation on the back end. Docs here.

It is out of date though. I updated the outlines version in their requirements and am running tests now to see if we can increment the version they use.