Pennylane-lightning dev dependency in Catalyst build

Hi there,

I’m trying to follow the minimal building from source guide for MacOS, but am running into build errors. Specifically, there appears to be a dependency on pennylane-lightning==0.41.0-dev22, and it’s not entirely clear to me how to avoid this. I have tried manually installing a specific non-dev version of these and disabling the uninstall in the Makefile, as well as modifying the PennyLane_Catalyst.egg-info/requires.txt, but neither seemed to help with the dependency error:

install Catalyst Frontend
# Uninstall pennylane before updating Catalyst, since pip will not replace two development
# versions of a package with the same version tag (e.g. 0.38-dev0).
/path/to/catalyst/.venv/bin/python3 -m pip uninstall -y pennylane
Found existing installation: PennyLane 0.40.0
Uninstalling PennyLane-0.40.0:
  Successfully uninstalled PennyLane-0.40.0
/path/to/catalyst/.venv/bin/python3 -m pip install -e . --extra-index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple 
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://test.pypi.org/simple
Obtaining file:///path/to/catalyst
  Installing build dependencies ... done
  Checking if build backend supports build_editable ... done
  Getting requirements to build editable ... done
  Preparing editable metadata (pyproject.toml) ... done
Collecting pennylane==0.41.0-dev38 (from PennyLane-Catalyst==0.11.0.dev43)
  Using cached https://test-files.pythonhosted.org/packages/a2/7d/b9098fad09757f0bcf2a3c10925a7c77cbbab086f6f8c4cd9cb70671dbd1/pennylane-0.41.0.dev38-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (11 kB)
INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of pennylane-catalyst to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while.
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement pennylane-lightning==0.41.0-dev22 (from pennylane-catalyst) (from versions: 0.11.0, 0.12.0, 0.14.0, 0.15.0, 0.15.1, 0.17.0, 0.18.0, 0.19.0, 0.20.0, 0.20.1, 0.20.2, 0.21.0, 0.22.0, 0.22.1, 0.23.0, 0.24.0, 0.25.0, 0.25.1, 0.26.0, 0.26.1, 0.27.0, 0.28.0, 0.28.1, 0.28.2, 0.29.0, 0.30.0, 0.31.0, 0.32.0, 0.33.0, 0.33.1, 0.34.0, 0.35.0, 0.35.1, 0.36.0, 0.37.0, 0.38.0, 0.39.0, 0.40.0)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for pennylane-lightning==0.41.0-dev22
make: *** [frontend] Error 1

Hi @n-io, welcome to the Catalyst community :slight_smile:

Regarding your question, if you are building a development version of Catalyst (from main rather than from release tags), we will often pin a specific development version of lightning and/or pennylane to deal with the concurrent development of both packages, and ensure the build configuration is reproducible in the future.

Let me have a look at the specific versions you posted and get back to you! Would you mind sharing your system information?

From what I can tell, Lightning wheels should be available for version 0.41.0-dev22 on macOS 13 and above, both x86 and arm, for Python 3.10-3.12. See the corresponding TestPyPI page:
https://test.pypi.org/project/PennyLane-Lightning/0.41.0.dev22/#files
Does your system fall outside of these parameters?