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MAINT: remove external samplers#1046

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mj-will wants to merge 15 commits intobilby-dev:mainfrom
mj-will:remove-external-samplers
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MAINT: remove external samplers#1046
mj-will wants to merge 15 commits intobilby-dev:mainfrom
mj-will:remove-external-samplers

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@mj-will mj-will commented Feb 18, 2026

Remove the external samplers for 3.0.

I see a few open questions:

  • How do we want to handle the examples?
    • For now I've left the examples that use other samplers but added an explicit error.
  • How should the tests work if external samplers are installed?
    • At the moment, they detect all available samplers, including any external samplers that are installed.
  • One of the doc notebooks uses external samples, should these be installed for the entire CI or just the docs CI?
  • Should we still provide sampler_requirements.txt?

@mj-will mj-will added this to the 3.0.0 milestone Feb 18, 2026
@mj-will mj-will added plugin Changes related to existing or new plugins sampling Issues about sampling algorithms, their efficiency and robustness labels Feb 18, 2026
@mj-will mj-will linked an issue Feb 18, 2026 that may be closed by this pull request
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mj-will commented Feb 18, 2026

#1041 needs to be merged before the CI can pass.

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  • How do we want to handle the examples?
    • For now I've left the examples that use other samplers but added an explicit error.

This looks good to me, neater than what we had before.

  • How should the tests work if external samplers are installed?
    • At the moment, they detect all available samplers, including any external samplers that are installed.

Probably, we should only test the ones we package.
It would be great if we can expose this test in some way that plugins can use it directly.

  • One of the doc notebooks uses external samples, should these be installed for the entire CI or just the docs CI?

Yeah, I think we should have at least a few of those available, maybe in the full CI.
It might be worth changing which ones are used, restrict it to maintained, easy to install ones?

  • Should we still provide sampler_requirements.txt?

I'm leaning to no, but could go either way.

- pytorch
- pymc>=5.9
- nessai
- ptmcmcsampler
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There are probably other packages that can be removed from here, but I imagine it will be a pain to go through and figure out which.

@mj-will mj-will force-pushed the remove-external-samplers branch 4 times, most recently from a76f035 to 3d91722 Compare February 19, 2026 08:53
@mj-will mj-will force-pushed the remove-external-samplers branch from 3d91722 to 7fa0a2b Compare February 27, 2026 16:36
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Transitioning to sampler plugins

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