Update installation instructions

[bonjourmauko]

Currently, the documentation for installing OpenFisca "On Windows without admin rights" points to a 4 year-old version of https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france:

I have the impression the whole section is outdated and misleading, and propose we either:

• Replace it by « how to bootstrap a country »
• Redirect to OpenFisca-Core and OpenFisca-Country-Template
• Or both

Thanks to @JasonMorrisSC who filed the issue.

[MattiSG]

The whole “installing” section of the doc is misleading: there is no instruction at all on the standard, simple way to install, only workarounds for edge cases!

[sandcha]

I agree that the whole installing section should be changed. 🙌

But why did we create this page? 🙀

Here is some context about the 3rd step that we mention in this issue: it was created for Windows users without admin rights on offline machines.
That's why it contains a package of the old wheels: this package was manually (and painfully) created. It was meant to be downloaded on an USB key to be carried to the offline machines. 😅

And now what? 🤔

Today, I think that offline machines are uncommon and that we can remove this use case to focus on the Windows users without admin rights. Do you agree?

Knowing that even a secure and offline environment like the CASD agrees to use conda packages.

Then, how can we install openfisca on Windows without admin rights? 🤯

The easiest installation instructions might differ from one country model to another:

• openfisca-core and openfisca-france users can now be guided to a conda installation.
• other models, as far as I know, don't have conda packages so the default pip installation might be the best option (works on online machines); this will also require a decision on the default terminal to choose (Default Windows cmd? GitBash? PowerShell? Windows WSL needs admin rights to be installed).

Meanwhile, what can we do?

A quick fix to the 3rd step could be to replace it with a title that specifies the country package (France, for now) and the following instructions (extract from an email):

You have installed GIT, Python 3.7 and Miniconda. All you need now is initializing conda configuration and downloading openfisca-france library (and dependencies).
Miniconda will allow you to do so:

First check that miniconda is fully installed and that you can call the "conda" command:

$ conda

It should return some documentation:

usage: conda [-h] [-V] command ...

conda is a tool for managing and deploying applications, environments and packages.
...

Then, if this first step ended without error, you can configure the conda-forge channel that will provide the libraries with:

$ conda config --add channels conda-forge && conda config --set channel_priority strict

From this step you can already install openfisca-france model but we advise you to create an isolated environment for your project in two commands (optional):

• by creating a virtual environment (named "openfisca" for example):

$ conda create --name openfisca python=3.7

• and activating this virtual environment with:

$ conda activate openfisca

Finally, you can install openfisca-france:

$ conda install openfisca-france

You are all set! And you can check the installed libraries with:

$ conda list

You can also exit the virtual environment at any moment when you don't need to use openfisca-france code with:

$ conda deactivate

These steps come from openfisca-france README. We could add the country-template to conda if we decide that conda is a good solution and knowing that the first step toward it was done (for openfisca-core conda package): the country-template deployment now posts a .tar.gz of the package on pypi.

[MattiSG]

To close this issue:

1. Rebase Update default installation instructions #260.
2. Proofread and complete Update default installation instructions #260 contents.
3. Open a PR.
4. 🚢

[verbman]

Noting that the presets page links to packages on Anaconda which are very out of date:
https://anaconda.org/search?q=openfisca-country-template

Is the intention to maintain these packages or remove them from Anaconda and from the documentation?

[MattiSG]

The Conda outdated packages would be solved by openfisca/country-template#124.

[MattiSG]

Done in #306!