Exclude external dependencies from MXNet JAR.

[tklein23]

Description

The current MXNet build process adds external dependencies to the JAR, which may conflict with local dependencies on the classpath. In my case commons-io was replaced by MXNet and caused some method-not-found errors.

Please find my proposed change in the PR. It's work in progress and I'm happy to iterate if we agree on the the general direction. I have seen a similar change on the 1.5.x branch, so I assume we can apply a similar change here.

No testing was done locally and I hope Travis will catch obvious problems.

Checklist

Essentials

Please feel free to remove inapplicable items for your PR.

• The PR title starts with [MXNET-$JIRA_ID], where $JIRA_ID refers to the relevant JIRA issue created (except PRs with tiny changes)
• Changes are complete (i.e. I finished coding on this PR)
• All changes have test coverage:
• Unit tests are added for small changes to verify correctness (e.g. adding a new operator)
• Nightly tests are added for complicated/long-running ones (e.g. changing distributed kvstore)
• Build tests will be added for build configuration changes (e.g. adding a new build option with NCCL)
• Code is well-documented:
• For user-facing API changes, API doc string has been updated.
• For new C++ functions in header files, their functionalities and arguments are documented.
• For new examples, README.md is added to explain the what the example does, the source of the dataset, expected performance on test set and reference to the original paper if applicable
• Check the API doc at https://mxnet-ci-doc.s3-accelerate.dualstack.amazonaws.com/PR-$PR_ID/$BUILD_ID/index.html
• To the my best knowledge, examples are either not affected by this change, or have been fixed to be compatible with this change

Comments

• If this change is a backward incompatible change, why must this change be made.
• Interesting edge cases to note here

[lanking520]

Thanks for your contribution @tklein23 . Please try to refer this PR: c6b1fd5 to add these dependencies in the deploy section

[lanking520]

To make it clear, all you need to do is to add your removed dependencies in scala-package/deploy/src/main/deploy/deploy.xml and that should solve the Clojure problem

[tklein23]

@lanking520 - Thanks, I updated a few POM files similar to the PR you mentioned. Except, there's no scala-package/deploy in 1.4.x. New revision compiles and passes integration tests locally. However, release failed due to GPG issues.

[lanking520]

Don't worry much on the GPG end. Let's try to fix the Clojure part first.
https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/v1.4.x/scala-package/assembly/osx-x86_64-cpu/pom.xml#L33-L50
https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/v1.4.x/scala-package/assembly/linux-x86_64-cpu/pom.xml#L33-L50

In here try to add the dependencies from master. This is the configuration pom file for the final package publishing.

The core problem currently we have is that the descriptor file (pom file) that we generate did not inlcude the depedencies we exclude. By adding these dependencies in the pom, Clojure would try to fetch the packages and that should resolve the dependencies not found problem

[tklein23]

Since I cannot reproduce the failing build locally, doing a bit of trial-and-error now: Adding the dependencies to clojure, since this is what's failing.

[tklein23]

Thanks all for your comments. CI is green now. Will squash the commits so that it can be pushed.

[tklein23]

CI is green. Two checks are stuck in the UI, but are completed successfully when checking the details.

[lanking520]

Thanks for your contribution, get it shipped

[gigasquid]

This was merged in the 1.4 branch - is it also going to make its way to master?

[zachgk]

The equivalent that was merged into master was issue #13929 and PR #14000